35 year old photo restore workflow

[smoothfluid]

Firstly can I just say that this site is brilliant. I moved companies, lost my bookmarks and forgot all about restoring/retouching and it wasn't until I got a friendly reminder that you are still here that I remembered why I signed up!

I have ’borrowed‘ this photo of my mother and want to restore it to its former glory as a gift. My photoshop skill are pretty sharp but I just wanted ask if anyone had a particular workflow they might recommend to avoid commont pitfalls (whatever they might be).

The red channel and/or the cyan seem an obvious place to start in terms of the oval fade, but then won’t I ruin the colour of the rest of the image? or should I paint in the colour afterwards? and of all the colourspaces I hardly ever work in cmyk, but is this a time to start?

thank you

[lurch]

Some good tips in this thread
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/ima...how-start.html

[unimatrix001]

Here is tutorial on getting the ring out
http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=245

[smoothfluid]

Thanks for those links, they look perfect (esp the Ring one)!

[Kraellin]

first, welcome to RP.

second, i dont think the original was in color. it looks like one of those old polaroid cameras, the cheaper ones where you had to brush on a fluid on the image after you took the photo to sort of set it/preserve it. and those were strictly black and white.

and lastly, i had a go at this, including colorizing. this type of image always intrigues me.

the rough workflow was bringing out the image contrast with brightness/contrast, clarify and shadows/midtones/highlights.

next was cleaning things up. noise reduction, cloning out specs and mars and so on.

next was the colorizing. blank layers, blend mode = color and do several different layers. (that's just rough, since one layer was actually multiply).

used the ellipse selection tool and inverted to do the frame then a flood fill. inverted back again and cloned out the white borders top and bottom.

sorry the frame wasnt perfectly aligned. you could just add some more canvas and fix that by adding more white on the right and bottom.

[Verywierd]

I started with basic histogram tuning for each colour to bring back as much colour saturation as possible.

Contrast, saturation and brightness adjustment by area using the Viveza plugin.

Next I used the replace colour function to adjust individual areas of colour cast. Then on new blank layers in colour blending mode, I selected colours from the picture that I felt were most representative, filled the layer and painted it in using a black mask to level out colour gradients.

Some clone and heal tool to clean up dirt and speckles and to remove any edges between the variously faded areas.

Overall contrast adjustment.

[smoothfluid]

Thanks! I don't think mum could tough-out a snowy day in a summer shirt though VeryWierd
My turn now. I forgot my Wacom in the office so will get on to it tonight. As far as I can tell it is a 'real colour photo, so I'll see if I can work some magic with the guidance you've all given me.

[Verywierd]

Studying the original pic, especially at the left, it appears that there is a definite edge between the grass and what appears to be a gravel driveway. However, it's your pic so you should know better

[smoothfluid]

I hadn't even noticed that!

[chillin]

-I have pulled back the green & blue channel
-I have run levels adjustment on the most preserved piece (the right side of the pic)
-Pasted over that piece & use it as a source for selective curves adjustments.
-& more targeted curves + noise removal (a lot of jpg artifacts in this pic)

[smoothfluid]

Here’s where I have got to. (attached).
I firstly balanced the colour in LAB as best as I could, then used a selective colour adjustment layer in RGB (the psd Flora provides here was a great help). A couple of curves and a hue saturation adjustment layer helped too. As there is an elipse and a rectangle in this photo’s been pretty tricky to get a balance, but I figure some cloning is next in line.
The weird thing s the fingerprints that kept popping up with the adjustment layers. I felt like I was in a CSI lab!
Still got some more hours to do on it (dodging and burning etc), but I just wanted to say THANKS for the tips. they’ve been most helpful.

[smoothfluid]

Final result.
All the final tweaking was done in channel mixers and colour balance, with no overpainting. I was amazed how far you can go with just those.

[Verywierd]

Nice job. You're right, never start painting unless you have exhausted every possibility of recovering what is still there.