how can i improve this

[mepaulus]

this is a photo from the early sixties which i have restored but it does,nt look right because of the grey building contrasting too starkly with the colours of the wedding group , can anybody give any suggestions on how i can improve it.I can provide bigger files if anyone needs them.

[secretsquirrel]

You seem to be a little over saturated and your colors are out of balance. I would start over and open the image in raw if possible. If not, try beginning with the shadow/highlight adjustment and then go into levels.

[TommyO]

My first thought was to crop and enlarge, then modify the overall contrast. But, I'm afraid there may not be sufficient detail in the people to do that. They will just end up looking soft and fake.

So, I would simply try masking the background and experiment with different color and contrast combinations. After that, also try retouching the edges of the people a tad to ensure they look crisp (but too much).

Good job overall in bringing out the building detail. But, the focus should be on the people.

[mepaulus]

I managed to bring a bit of natural colour to the background by selecting it and used hue/saturation-colourize , also took on board comments , desaturated the reds and blues a bit and tried to sharpen the figures , it loses a bit in compression unfortunately.

[Cupcake]

Here is my try.

[0lBaldy]

mepaulus, I like your first attempt much better.. to me it looks as if the people in the second version have tooo much noise removal and are pasted in as opposed to the background.. the people also look blurred and over sharpened to me..
In the first version they seem to go with the overall picture much better and do not seem separated and the whole picture seems to have better detail

[MooNy214]

Hello
I did a bit of "something" on the photo, here's the link to the image:
http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=gx1MYRR0

Tell me if you like it

[roger_ele]

Here is my take, on my laptop so tones are more of a guess. Some of my (assuming anyone likes my take on this) 'somethings' ...

- Use of blue channel into an empty layer - lunimosity mode - changed opacity to taste
- Use of channels adjustment layer in screen mode, used blend options so that the lighter areas were not affected, duplicated this layer a few times, then created a blank layer and ctrl-alt-shift-E to paste the combined image into the empty layer, changed this lighter image to luminosity blend mode and deleted the lower channels adjustment layers ...
- Then levels, tonal and color adjustments with curves often using color and luminosity blend modes so that the color doesn't drift too far.


Roger