faded color photo

[CathyH]

Hello
I'm trying to restore the color in this photo, I have tried to get it back with the curves adjustment technique. Which is to take the white eye dropper and find the whitest white and then find the blackest black. This helps a lot with the tone but I still don't get any color in the back ground and the skin color is wrong too.

Any help would be great.

Thanks
cathy

[aartist]

Fade correction does a lot.
Normally I would recolor especially the background if you needed it.

[0lBaldy]

This is what I got playing with levels after getting the Black, Grey, white points... It still looked a bit off color then adjusted the red, blue, green in levels till it looked OK to me..

The curves layer is a final minor tweak for the color

[CathyH]

Thank you, aartist and olbaldy.
I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track. So after doing these first steps, then I would colorize the background, because I'm not getting any real color out of it.

[MiningArt]

Adjusted the levels a bit and then did a repaint.

[mistermonday]

Hi Cathy, I performed a levels adjust on each channel and then used a Selective Adj Layer to fine tune the colors.
Regards, Murray

[lurch]

Slightly different tack here -

First used curves to adjust black, white, and gray points (I assumed the fence posts, weathered wood, would be pretty much gray). Then used another curves layer to get the skin tones. Made that layer mask black, painted it white in the skin areas. The lady's hair was still a little yellow, so took care of that by taking a little yellow out of the neutral tones in a masked selective color layer. Left the background as it came out after the bwg color move - there's a hint of green there.

[CathyH]

Thanks Miningart, mistermonday, lurch I will try all of your suggestions and see what I like best.

[unimatrix001]

I did similar to lurch. used a levels adjustment layer to get rid of the red color cast. then used 4 color balance layers. One for the skintone, one for the hair color, one for the lips, and one for the background.

[chillin]

Few selective curves adjustments.

[CathyH]

Thanks Chillin and Unimatrix I really appreciate all of your helpful suggestions.
Here is what I finished with, the client wanted some enhancements done to her.

[alshaiji]

Hello there
well....

the attched photo will explain it all

Thanks

alshaiji

[Gary]

Originally Posted by CathyH

Hello
I'm trying to restore the color in this photo, I have tried to get it back with the curves adjustment technique. Which is to take the white eye dropper and find the whitest white and then find the blackest black. This helps a lot with the tone but I still don't get any color in the back ground and the skin color is wrong too.
Any help would be great.
Thanks
cathy

I desaturated the original with CS4 B&W and then followed(somewhat..) this tutorial.
http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161015&page=1
With each recolor, i.e. her skin, I set a selective color adjustment layer overtop to effect the tones, brightness etc. A curves adjustment could do good here too.
I then selected her, copied her to a new layer, replaced the background and merged down. I used Topaz Detail to sharpen and placed a darker border vignette.

Cheers.

[CathyH]

alshaiji Thank you for the help, I used that method mostly to do mine also.
Gary very nice colors and I like the background change.

cathy

[aartist]

Gary, superb rendering!!!

[Cupcake]

Some simple ajustments.
I then recolored it.

[CathyH]

thanks cupcake that turned out nice.
cathy

[philbach]

I used Lab plus I colorized some of the background.

[Gary]

Originally Posted by aartist

Gary, superb rendering!!!

Thank you. Your comments are appreciated.

Cheers!

[CathyH]

Nice job Phil, I have never really worked with LAB.

[philbach]

Thank you. Lab can be very helpful in some cases.

[Douglas]

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but when I scan, I activate the "colour restoration" function in my Epson scanning program and it usually surprises me by the amount of colour restoration it does. I use this with slides and prints with amazing results. Quite often no other restoration of colour is needed.

[philbach]

Hi Douglas, and welcome to retouch pro. Many times the automatic features of your scanning program do do a nice job. But often on badly discolored photos that is not enough. So then its probably best to turn off the automatic adjustments feature in the scanning program, scan in 48 bit color and work on the photo in photoshop.

[artist1961]

I used Lab plus I colorized some of the background.

but what does lab plus mean and is it a plugin for ps or a standalone


This is all i can find

Tucked away in the top right corner of the colour picker in Photoshop are some radio buttons marked L, a, and b. These belong to a colour mode known as Lab and are often the last stopping place for a Photoshop user on their journey to expert status. However when used correctly (and often sparingly) Lab can provide some spectacular results for the power user. If you want to know more, read on.

What is Lab In an RGB Photoshop image you will find four channels, the Composite RGB, a Red, a Green and a Blue. Between them they define the actual colour and density of a pixel and they are inter-related. A neutral pixel will have RGB values that are all equal for example 121R 121G 121B is a mid tone 18% grey (in a system with a gamma of 2.2). If you try to remove a red cast using the Red curve by moving the curve you also change the tone density. You are continually forced to consider whether to correct the red by removing red or adding blue and green. Both will correct the colour cast but one will make the tone lighter, the other move will make the tone darker.

This is the key difference with Lab - the colour and tone density are divorced from each other and can be independently adjusted without any cross-over effects. The channels in Lab are the L-Channel, the lightness or Luminosity a-channel the greenness to redness (-128 is green +128 is red)* b-channel the yellowness to blueness (-128 is blue +128 is yellow)

*The green is actually close to an aqua and the red is closer to a magenta. When the Lab colour was defined (also known as L*A*B* or L*a*b* or CEI Lab) they chose the colour pairs on the grounds that we do not perceive any "greenyreds" or "yellowy-blues" - they are essentially opponent colours.

Practical Importance The practical importance of Lab is that colour and detail are not linked. A colour with aand b values of zero is always neutral, regardless of how light or dark it is. Therefore if you have an image that has neutral colour balance you can steepen the L-channel and add sparkle to the result by increasing the contrast OR you can steepen both the aand b channels whilst keeping their curves passing through the mid points without affecting the colour balance but increasing their saturation.

In the example landscape shown, the image is very slightly blue but overall the early morning light has not produced much colour saturation. Increasing the contrast was not appropriate as it would have veiled the highlights and clogged the shadows- the Lightness channel was therefore left untouched. More sparkle was however provide by steepening both the a and b channels by rotating the curves around the centre point of the curves graph. Note in the composite screen grab how flat looking the channels are and that the Lightness channel is a moderately good monochrome image containing all the tone density and details.

LAB

LEFT: The magenta-green and yellow-blue opponent colours show on the axes of the
Lab £D colour space, the lightness rises on
the vertical plane. The shape of a gamut is
shon on the right. Only those colours which lie
within this shape can be accurately printed by the
device, other colours will be
adjusted.

..


if u have more share it

[artist1961]

i think this can be done in just one click with plugin called color magician i will post my result soon as right now i have to leave

[artist1961]

feel free for any questions u have as i keep things simple when working





one click result just took few secs to get this result

[Douglas]

Originally Posted by philbach

Hi Douglas, and welcome to retouch pro. Many times the automatic features of your scanning program do do a nice job. But often on badly discolored photos that is not enough. So then its probably best to turn off the automatic adjustments feature in the scanning program, scan in 48 bit color and work on the photo in photoshop.

Thanks for the welcome. I really enjoy learning and reading the various ways people have of doing things. Much more advanced in PS than I am at the moment. Each day I try to learn a bit more.

Douglas

[chaim01]

I am trying out the Kodak ROC so it still has the water marks. What do you think? I have a large amount of faded photos that need restoration. Are there other programs that members of the forum recommend?
chaim

[evas]

Mistermonday, so nice job.

[chaim01]

Did anyone here ever use color washer?
chaim