Orange Spots on 70's photo

[ellemir]

Hi,
I having been doing photo restoration for several years now, but I'm stumped with with the attached photo.

I find a lot of photo's around the 70's develop these terrible orange spots. I can cope with them on most background, skin etc., but I am having a huge amount of trouble even lessening the orange on this girls hair, especially on the crown. I've tried selecting the orange, changing the colour value to the opposite, which doesn't help at all, removing by patch or spot removal doesn't work because of the fine straight hair - it just looks terrible and extremely obvious. I'm not sure that the orange dots show up to clearly on the attachment for you to see what I mean.

I have changed it to B&W which makes quite a nice looking picture, but it is needed to be done in colour! I have tried everything I can think of, including banging my head on the desk!!
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to at least make it less obvious?

Thanks for any suggestions

Ellemir

[mistermonday]

Ellemir, welcome to Retouch Pro. For this image I would do the following (assuming you have Photoshop):
- Image > Mode > Lab Color
- In the Channel Palette, select the B channel
- Image > Apply Image and from the dialog window choose the "a" Channel, set the blending mode to Exclusion and the opacity = 100%

And now your done. You have blacked out the face and so I can not see the skin tones so you may need to add a Hue Sat adj or Selective Color adj layer to tweak the color.

Regards, Murray

[ellemir]

Hi Murray,

thanks for your fast response. Sorry, yes I am using Photoshop CS3. I have tried doing as you suggest several times, and each time just end up with a greyed over picture. Obviously I am doing something wrong but haven't managed to make any difference. What am I missing? Oh, and the little girl has very fair skin.

Thanks
Ellemir

[BitG]

Very good technique mistermonday, very useful for future projects.

Ellemir, make sure you recheck a channel lightness and lab before you go back to layers.

hope this helps,
Grant

[ellemir]

Thanks to both of you, obviously my brain was turned off with all the desk banging. After rechecking the channels I have managed with (as you said) a bit more tweaking with the colours to achieve quite a good result I think. We'll see, when it's printed.

Thanks again
Ellemir

[mistermonday]

If you want to see what is going on while you are using the Apply Image to a channel after you have selected a channel. is to click the eye icon of the composite channel. This will let you preview what the result will look like.
Regards, Murray