Help restoring original colours to this photo?

[Jeanne C]

Hi there, someone as asked me to restore this photo for them and I have no idea how to go about fixing the colour in it. They do not want it converted to black and white, instead they want the original colours brought back (and obviously the green and magenta casts gone). If anyone could walk me through ways to restore the colour in this photo I would be very grateful. Thank you! (P.s. I use Photoshop CC. Also before it is brought up, I cannot scan the photo in again as I do not have it, this is what they gave me (a digital, jpg and a tif at this resolution) and we do not have access to the original negative)

Photo on google Drive link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z_alTcJeGn8CB7EBxhQbNmwmppbWG5Ev/view?usp=sharing

[JoReam]

Hi Jeanne. Looking at the damage it is different in different parts of the image. You are going to need to do some basic cloning/healing and fixing first - to get rid of the spots....and even things out a bit.... then there are really only a couple of strategies either 1.mask off different areas - and experiment with different colour correction methods in isolation and see which works best for that bit of damage, ie. the red areas and the green areas or 2. convert to black and white and reintroduce the colour. To be honest I am not sure which would be quicker - but hope that gives you inspiration to get started ….

[Smudger7]

Hi Jeanne, I was going to write that I had a quick look at your photo and, looking only at the colour correction side of things, reduced a lot of the green cast, magenta stain and blue spots globally. A curves layer with black (the small square to the lower right of the image), white (highlights on the man's shirt collar) and grey (the trousers of the boy on the left) followed by the stain removal technique I first read about on Katrin Eismann's Restoration book (3rd edition pp 217-219). This involved a temporary new image layer and a Colour Range selection for Magenta, followed by a HSL adjustment layer masked by the results of the Colour Range Selection and then copied multiple times (8 in my case) to minimise the Stain. After that, two more Colour Range selections for the blue spots, each followed by a masked curves layer with an adjusted Blue curve pretty much negated the Blue spots. This seems to have reversed the various stains.

However, as an alternative I tried instead a BW adjustment layer in Luminosity blend mode and the "Auto" adjustment, amended by moving the Magenta slider to -200 seemed to have almost as good an effect on the Colour issues and looks to have minimised a very large number of the scratches. Which I wasn't expecting!

I hope this helps.

[Smudger7]

[Gary]

[philbach]

I made a new layer and filled that layer with the green channel. That created a b&w picture but using just the green channel eliminated numerous artifacts.