Water damage causing color bleed--Help needed

[happyheart]

I have received a photo from Operation Photo Rescue that has a very bad bleed of Red over most of the photo. All of the channels are affected to some extent. The photo is RGB and is color. Of course it is a wedding photo, so it's very noticable on the bride's dress! Can anyone suggest a good way to eliminate the bleed??

Thanks in advance.
Happy Heart

[mistermonday]

HH, there may be some ways which are much more effective than others depending on the image. It would be more effective if you posted the image or a representative part of the image for members to examine.
Regards, Murray

[happyheart]

Thanks for the reply. I'm not going to post the whole image, as I don't know how the rescue organization and/or the owners of the photo would feel about that. However, I cropped the worst damage and am posting it as a sample of the damage. The bleed is pretty much over the whole image, and there was some bleaching damage where all pigment was gone. For the most part, I repaired the bleed using the color replacement tool, but I'm just wondering if there is an easier, or more effective way to do this.

Thanks in advance to all who have ideas.

[mistermonday]

Betty, the stain, while ubiquitous, appears to be low in color intensity. I found that taking the image into LAB color mode and then locking down the A curve and doing a selective pinning of the representative color to the zero axis significantly attenuated the red. Then a Hue Saturation adjust fixed some of the other areas. I stopped there after 2 or 3 minutes but from that point you could make some global large adjustments to wipe out the remaining stain on a duplicate layer and apply a layer mask and paint back the areas to be restored, or you could do some selective colorizing. Good luck with the restoration.
Regards, Murray

[Daviskw]

Hello there

Many ways but i just stayed simple. I used a lighten layer and sampled and painted over the wall stain. I used Hue/saturation layers to remove the stain from flag and clothes... Then adjusted the luminosity some in the white of the flag to remove the yellow and red stain.

Butch

[happyheart]

Gentlemen....Thank you! I'll give both methods a try.
Daviskw's method seems to have retained more of the original color of the picture. I'll experiment with both, so that next time I'll have some alternatives.

[Flora]

Hi,

happyheart,

I used Hue/Saturation, Levels and Heal Brush on selected areas to remove the Red bleed and brighten up.