Colour Balance issues

[Nezbitten]

Hi there

This will be the first time ive asked for help. I have this large group shot that has faded. It has lost yellow and greens leaving mostly cyan and red.

I have done many of this type before but this one just seems to escape me. There is a overly cyan cast but when that is removed whats left is clearly far from what it should be.

Any suggestions please, if you can help?

[Tony W]

Re: Colour Balance issues

It looks like the image is suffering both dark fading and light fading consequently the ROI has lost a lot of the dye that forms the image.

In addition you may want to consider the state of colour film reproduction at the time the image was shot as well as the quality of some lab processing at that time.

Anyway one way that you may want to consider is boosting the colour saturation using Lab Color. Quick play here, arrived at by:

1. Correcting colour as far as possible in RGB
2. Dup layer and convert to Lab Color
3. Check the a and b channels for noise (in the jpeg noise is apparent in the b channel). If you find noisey/grain then you may want to consider blurring these channels to even out noise.
4. Pull in the white and black points in the Lab 'a' and 'b' channels
5. You should now have a much needed boost in saturation
6. You can now convert back to RGB or just drag over the Lab document to your RGB and select either Normal or Color blend.
7. Finally you will probably find areas of colour that you need to correct e.g. shirt or trousers exhibiting patchy color. This may be fixed by new layer set to Color and sample and paint over offending patches with low opacity brush.

Roughly this is what I did with the attached took longer to write down than do. Hope it gives you some ideas to progress the restore

[Nezbitten]

Re: Colour Balance issues

I arrived at something almost the same from working through my normal methods. The problem is that shawl is coming up green tinted. Im sure it was grey. I think ultimately ill have to do some recolouring, which is no problem. The underlying yellow tones to the skin whilst having not enough red is also a puzzle.

The image also suffers, (not seen here ) from the "yellow spot" which could be mostly fixed by using the lightness channel to replace the blue channel where all the spots reside. But i still end up have the colour issues.

Thank you for your suggestions Ill give them a go anyway. As you say it is messed up colour wise. !

[JoReam]

Hi
Thats an impresive colour restoration Tony. Just reading this I thought, if you wanted to make the shawl black and white or shades of gray, Nezbitten, you could copy just the shawl onto a separate layer and try converting it to grayscale black and white using image adjustment - channel mixer or a black and white (or any of your favourite methods) applied. You may find you need to blend in the altered image a bit with the rest of the colour layers so it takes on a bit of its surrounds and looks natural against the other colours and it might save you a bit of colouring time.

[Nezbitten]

A bit late in responding but thank you for you help!