Please Help with our only surviving wedding photo

[Dave Francis]

Hi Everyone

Happy New year

I really need help with our only surviving wedding photo we were married on 29th December 1976 and only have this one old damaged polaroid photo, REMOVED ( because my website hosting has run out of monthly band width sorry)could anyone point me to a tutorial of something similar or advice me on how to approach fixing it

TIA

Dave N Julie

[mistermonday]

The color info is pretty well gone and 2 of the 3 channels are very weak. I would take the Blue channel to make a new document, run a noise filter on it, use the Shadow / Highlight tool to brighten it, or a curve, or a screen blend mode against itself, etc. You should be able to get an acceptable B&W image which you could then recolor manually if you wanted to go back to color. Good luck with the restoration,
Regards, Murray

[Frank Lopes]

I used just as MisterMonday, the blue channel to bring out some more detail.
Cleaned the noise with Dfine and adjusted the levels and curves.

Originally Posted by Dave Francis

Hi Everyone
I really need help with our only surviving wedding photo...
Dave N Julie

[skydog]

Frank, Murry...I agree with you when I looked at the channels, but I still don't know how to bring the blue channel to the surface for use.

[mistermonday]

Skydog, there are a couple of ways to do so.
1. In the Channels Palette, click on the Blue Channel, then Select All, Then Copy, click on the composite image, go back to the Layers Palette and select paste. You should end up with a grayscale layer as Layer 1 on top of the background.
2. Ctrl J to duplicate the background, then Image>Apply Image and select the Background as the source, choose the Blue channel, make sure the Blend Mode is Normal and Opacity = 100% and click OK. Your Layer 1 will now be replaced by 3 channels which are all identical to the Blue channel just as in method 1. above.
Regards, Murray

[Enkay]

I don't think you will be able to get any color information out of that picture.. I tried a few things with apply image and messing with the channels but you're better off with a black and white restore I think.

The way I did it... (I didn't save the file)

1. As everyone else said, open the channel views and select the blue layer. Right click and select duplicate channel. Choose a New document.

2. Add a levels adjusment layer and slide the black point and white point are where the image information start and ends to add some contrast.

3. Add a level adjustment layer, don't change any setting and set the blend mode to multiply. Add a mask and make it all black. Add a white to black gradient and click on the right edge of the image and drag it horizontally to where the woman's jacket opens pretty much. This will take care of most of the over exposure on the right.

4. Do the same as the previous step but make the gradient a little longer and lower the opacity until it looks good. Experiement with the gradients in both these steps until you get a consistant exposure level across the image.

5. Take care of all the scratches! Methods will vary, the easiest one is to use the spot healing tool, or the clone stamp tool.

6. To give it a more finished look you could add a sepia tone to it or a blueish tone. Use a solid color filter set to color blend mode or a photo filter adjusment layer for this.

[saby]

after levels correction the blue chanel had the best draw so i made a channel mixer layer blending mode luminosity
at chanel red:
red 0%
blue 100%
at chanel green:
green 30%
blue 70%
saved
after this assigned a new rgb profile whitch contains linear gamma
saved another file, placed as a new layer on my saved one
made a layer mask filled 50% balck
painted on the mask by a brush op: 100% flow: 3%

[chillin]

I've spent on it about 3 hrs. I think this photo needs a lot of work to become a decent picture. I used "targeted curves" to bring back some colors. Julie's face can be used as a good sampling area.

[saby]

Another great one of Ur chillin, did U use it's own colors?

[chillin]

Thanks Saby.
No, I enhanced the original ones, but by changing the targeted values I probably add some extra colors/tones.

[zganie]

First Rescan this photo,the noise is from the scanner you used try again turn off everything auto on your scanner or find a better scanner

You could try to scan twice Once for highlights Once for shadow detail

Zganie

[0lBaldy]

WOW!! What an improvement.. Great Job chillin!!

[Dave Francis]

A massive Thank You to everyone for your help , and also for all your time restoring it for us, its just brilliant of you all to help, we are very very happy, to have all those great variations, to reflect on, as it is sadly its our only photo left, and now we can see it much better and even in colour, "Thank You All Again"

I have tried many times, without much success, I will have a go at it again using all your suggestions, as how to go about it,

Thankyou

Dave N Julie

Some photos I have re-done for other people

[HelenC]

Gave this pic a try using levels and curves. Blue channel apply image in multiply mode.Changed to grayscale. Surface blur and gaussian blur. Added a brownish coloured layer to give a sepia starting point to recolour by hand. Would take quite a while to work on to give a better finish.

Cheers
Helen

[Cameraken]

Hi.

The Cyan channel has become inverted (most strange)

Once the cyan channel is inverted this image appears to be sepia rather than colour

Still not sure though.

Ken.