Faded Image With Nasty Blue Colour Cast

[Big Red Bird]

Hi All,

I have been lurking on the forum for a while, but this is my first post, so please be gentle with me.

I have an old faded photo that I am looking to restore. Having read many many threads on this forum I have been trying for some weeks now to improve this one, but every time I adjust colours, levels, adjustment layers and so on I end up with a horrid blue patch right in the middle of the image which is not apparent in the original which I have attached.

The picture has been scanned numerous times on different scanners and has also been photographed, but the blue keeps coming back.

I have never come across this before and am aging prematurely trying to figure it out.

I have been trying to do it now by cutting out the people and recolouring them one at a time, but I am not sure if there is a more effective way to do it and I would really appreciate any thoughts that members might have.

This is the original scan.

[Big Red Bird]

.......and this is a copy of my latest effort. I have cut out the people (which I know I need to tidy up - I am working on that now) and have taken the blue colour out of the shirts (fairly simple to do) and am starting to work on the faces (not at all simple to do).

[spotter]

try using the replace colour brush.
Use colour mode and continuous sampling.
Play with the tolerance till you find what works.
Then alt click to sample a good bit of skin colour, then paint over the blue on the faces.
It should replace the blue under the cursor with your sampled colour.

[Repairman]

I would scan the image twice on a high end drum scanner. One scan 'normal' and one much darker and then blend the two files together selecting the best areas of both images. Then get stuck in to the details! A lot of good stuff gets lost in poor scans.
R.

[TerryB]

Appears to have been sepia originally, or maybe a serious acidic paper/storage reaction.
Suggest you desaturate first (Ctl+U), then levels (Ctl+L), spot D&B as needed on a 50% gray Soft Light layer (Ctl+Shift+N), then colorize or take it to sepia.
Masks on the adjustments as you see fit.

[Big Red Bird]

Hi

Terry B, Repairman and Spotter. Thank you very much for your replies and your comments.

Some of the things I have tried and some I have have a go at shortly.

I know it looks to be Sepia, but it was a full colour image but has been hanging on a wall in direct sunlight for about 30 years, hence the current discolouration.

I will keep plugging away and thanks very much once again for your comments.

[el mago]

try auto adjust...then manual adjust

[Big Red Bird]

Hi El Mago

Thanks for the suggestion.

I can get as far as that but it leaves me with this great colour cast that stubbornly refuses to go away. It's what I need to do next that has me stumped.

[philbach]

This sure looks like a sepia. There just doesn't seem to be much color info. If you want to work in color here you could copy the blue channel and paste that on a new layer using luminosity as the blending mode. That would help.

As for me I would treat it now as a B&W image.

Notice that the blue channel is relatively well preserved.

I used a black and white adjustment layer and just used the blue channel to convert to black and white.

On top of that layer I used a levels adjustment layer.

From there you can start. At the end you can put sepia back in if you wish.

[Big Red Bird]

Hi Phil

Thanks for your comments and the work that you have done on this.

I promise you that this was a full colour image originally. I have another 28 of these in various states of decay.

Most of them I can get back with too much of a problem, but this one still ends up with the horrid blue cast across the middle that I cannot get rid of, other than by individually recolouring each person which is turning into a bit of a nightmare.

I will try following your suggestions and let you know how I get on.

[spotter]

My husband also retouches and he works on old photos all day long.
He suggested using the hue/saturation adjuster and reducing the saturation on the cyan or blue.
You might have to isolate it with a mask to avoid taking colour from areas you dont want to affect.

[Big Red Bird]

Hi Spotter

Thanks very much for your comments.

I am actually working on them right now, using them on another picture I am having trouble with.

I will try it on this one as well and will report the results back.

[Jerryb]

hi,
Sort of intimated,, all you great guys and i learned a lot from you... and i am asking a opinion to help me in my training...

One of the things i learned is always look to do a curve adjustments and look at the channels and one thing i notice, in this image, is that the red channel is very bad.... it almost completely blown out... and then when yo try to adjust it it appears to be extremely noisy and a little distorted....

Now doing a curve adjustment i can see most of the color however....
that bad red channel really tears up everyting.....

Would it be a good idea to replace the red channel with maybe the blue channel and go from there...?

[Doug Nelson]

You have uneven fading of the channels, so no global fix will work. I had moderate success using Select Color Range on the blue area, then filling a layer with the blue color, inverting, setting the blend mode to Color Dodge, and lowering the opacity. This was after making all tonal adjustments to each channel. Whichever technique you use, you'll still end up with some painting to fix it.

Hard to tell from the lowrez jpg, but it appears the scan is far too light. The red channel is clipped. When scanning old photos, always turn off all automatic settings on the scanner and scan so your composite histogram falls to zero on both ends. This won't work with slides or negs, but works fine with prints.

[Kraellin]

the broad white things around their necks are white. no blue in them. the floor is most likely a whitish with a reflection off the background, thus a bit reddish. the background is wood, therefore reddish/brownish, not white. all that blue is completely not in the original. it's ink or fading or discoloration or whatever but it's not in the original. remove it or cover it over.

you've done well so far. this is a most difficult image. i do hope you have a higher res to work on. this will take a lot of hand work. the fading and exposure is too irregular for much global type treatment. clone and airbrush are your friends here. use each on separate blank layers and dont be afraid to add more blank layers. use the color blend mode on some of them and dont be afraid to undo or erase... a lot! when you have things evened out a bit with clone and airbrush, add another color balance adjustment layer or even a channel mixer to re-tone the overall. you dont have to do this restore all with one action; work towards your goal in increments rather than trying to do it all in one shot. your only hope for some of those faces is a higher res image and even then some may be quite difficult. you might also try increasing the image size just so a few pixels doesnt equal an eye or a nose. it's always better to have many pixels in there for those things.

like i said, you've done well so far, just keep going.

[Big Red Bird]

Hi Doug

Thanks for your comments and for confirming what I thought. I will carry on doing it the hard way.

The image I am working with is much higher resolution at 300ppi but I read somewhere on the forum that I cannot upload images larger than 100kb.

Hi Craig

Thanks also for your comments and advice which are very gratefully received.

The sashes that they are wearing are actually blue (mostly).

I am posting a copy of one we have already done so that you can all see what they should look like.

Thanks again to everyone for your help.

[philbach]

Very nice Big Red Bird. Well done.