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Challenge: Bring back the color to this 20 year old picture?

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
This photograph, from a post on kid's smiles here, was taken with film. of course, 20 years ago. It's faded but retains the beauty of this lovely girl and her "barndoor" smile! The current faded version, is in itself still charming.

NILDA2.jpg

© Clayton Lofgren 1987-2007 Olympus OM-1

Can you restore this to its former rich color?

Here's the larger file for another try for anyone who might want to have a go. Remember to tell us how you do it!


Practice on this jpg for now but save your methodology as an action to do on the larger file if you wish. Then Clayton can be given the results of your good work.

Use any software or plugins you like but share the methodology! :)

Happy holidays and happy Christmas!

Asher
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I'm impressed so far! Thanks Brian!

Bernie, I've not used your method and it seems pretty effective! Thanks

Asher
 

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Anyone wanting to play with any pics I post is completely welcome do do so.

Ok, here's a take:

NILDA2_NC.jpg


Sorry Zach to invade your thread! I really like your 1st pic, she looks more shy on this one… well the 3rd pic is not bad at all but more "for the family" than the 1st…
 
When I worked at Applied Science Fiction (now Kodak), I worked on implementing the DIGITAL ROC technology built into some film scanners as a Photoshop plug-in. It works really well on these sorts of images (pardon the watermark, I don't have my registered version here at work).

NILDA2_DigitalROC.jpg


It's not perfect, but it gives you a good starting point for further retouching without a lot of work.

-Colleen
 

Clayton Lofgren

New member
I have not come up with a good tiff of this yet, but am impressed with what I see being done with this small file. I have been playing with some other old prints and an antique scanner, and am also impressed with how well autolevels in CS2 works.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Clayton,

Glad you like the talented work to date!

Maybe just provide the best you can or several, just without moving the picture in the scanner. If the scanner gives a DNG or other RAW file, that would be great! These guys will do better with whatever you have with the least changes.

Asher
 
One more...

OK, one more using just Bibble tools because I can't seem to stop fiddling with this image :)

NILDA2_Bibble_srgb.jpg


The highlights are a little cyan and I'd like to get the media damage cloned out, but I'm out of play time.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Colleen,

Are you seeing a lot of yellow in your last version. It's pretty good but she does seem to have yellow especially on her left cheek and neck.

Asher
 

Ray West

New member
I had a quick play a few days ago, used auto levels in cs2 and immediately got reasonable colour, then fiddled a bit more. I found I either got a sort of grey sludge on the left side of her face, and/or blown highlights on right cheek & nose. it would help to have some idea of the hair colour, something to work towards. No result as good as shown by others here, but I think with more effort, (layers/masking) the results from cs2 could be presentable.

Best wishes,

Ray
 
Are you seeing a lot of yellow in your last version. It's pretty good but she does seem to have yellow especially on her left cheek and neck.

Yes, you're right. The blue channel is particularly bad in that section. Because JPEG compression throws away information in places where it doesn't think you'll be able to see it, it can really wreck images where you're going to drastically adjust the exposure or white balance. You can see it in the Kodak ROC plug-in picture too. I think if we started from a less severely compressed original, we could get much better results.

I tend to like my portraits a little on the orangey side, so I probably did make her skin a little too warm. I didn't have time to do any channel mixing to compensate for the unequal dye fading which might go a long way toward fixing some of the issues in the shadows. I took a shortcut and did some selective saturation adjustments and I think that caused the weird looking colors.

-Colleen
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Colleen,

Another step forward! Which file did you use? I ask because there's a horizontal line below the left eye which is present in other people's files too. Is it also in the new larger TIFF file?

Asher
 
I used the TIFF from the yousendit link. I really just focused on the color and didn't pay much attention to any of the artifacts as you can probably tell :)

I was just fiddling with the action I saved an realized that you need to have Photoshop assign an sRGB profile to the image and not convert it to the working space. If you have questions about any of the steps just let me know. If I had time to tweak a bit more, I would run the action to right before the Channel Mixer step for the mask and fiddle with the blend a bit more.
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I was just fiddling with the action I saved an realized that you need to have Photoshop assign an sRGB profile to the image and not convert it to the working space. If you have questions about any of the steps just let me know. If I had time to tweak a bit more, I would run the action to right before the Channel Mixer step for the mask and fiddle with the blend a bit more.
Hi Colleen,

Are we sure that one would assign to sRGB and not assign and convert to RGB and then afterwards convert to sRGB for posting. "Assigning" alone to a color space is something gurus insist we should avoid!

Asher
 
I think I was rushing a bit when I recorded the action and fumbled a couple things. When I went back to look at it again and did the assign and convert, I realized the action wasn't going to work that way. If you want to replace the levels step so that it works in the correct color space, I used the technique for adjusting the white and black point that I explained in our Tips and Tricks forum. (The images in that thread aren't mine - we have permission to use them as demo images and the copyright belongs to their generous owners)

-Colleen
 

Joe Russo

New member
Hi,

I haven't posted here in a while but I have been 'lurking' in the background.

I thought I'd take a crack at this one. Tell me what you think:

2161017624_f45a6176bc_o.jpg


Method used:
1. Gross color cast correction
Make a copy of your background layer (Ctrl J)​
Select > Filter > Blur > Average (BG layer will turn a solid color)​
Make an adjustment layer for levels, use the grey eyedropper and click on your background copy (it will turn grey)​
Delete background copy layer​
Adjust the opacity slider above layer palette until you like the result​
2. Run a Polaroid Dust & Scratch removal plugin to remove damage.

2. Add Color Balance adjustment layer to decrease cyans,add a little green and yellow.

3. Add Hue and Saturation adjustment layer to bump the reds and bring down the yellows.

4. Add Curves adjustment layer to bump the contrast.

5. Duplicate background layer(keep below all adjustment layers), change the blend mode to screen.
Add a layer mask and fill with a black to white gradient, left to right, to even out the lighting.​
Lower the opacity of this layer to taste(~50%)​
 

Bob Buege

New member
Here's my attempt at your challenge. I use LViewPro for all my editing. It's a great program that you can download for free to try it out. If you decide that you like it, it only costs $40.

The difficulty in editing photos like this comes from the fact that the red component is so saturated that tools like histograms and curves have almost no effect on the photo. Almost all of the red information is at the far right end of the graph that you adjust in the histogram or curves tool. Any changes that you make in the middle will not change pixels that need to be changed.

The solution is to grab information from a different color channel. I split the photo into the RGB components. This gave me 3 B&W photos with a different photo for each color. I then copied the picture representing the green layer which was not saturated and pasted it onto the picture that came from the red layer as a new layer. I adjusted the transparency of the green layer to 20% and then merged both of the layers into a single layer.

I now had a slightly modified version of the red layer where the pixels were not saturated except where the green layer was also saturated. I combined the 3 B&W photos to recreate a color photo. The color was still off at this point but now the tools could work on the photo.

I was then able to correct the color with nothing more than the histogram tool and curves tool.


NILDA2_bobbuege.jpg
 

Clayton Lofgren

New member
I would hate to try pick a winner out of all the good work we have seen on this. These last two merged together would be interesting to see.
 

Bob Buege

New member
I would hate to try pick a winner out of all the good work we have seen on this. These last two merged together would be interesting to see.

I agree that my picture removed too much of the redish cast. When I got to this point I decided to start over with the higher resolution version. I gave up when I found that the high resolution version was no longer available.

I would try combining just 15% opacity of the green layer with the red layer if I was to do this again. One of the things that I like about avoiding the use of filters to soften the picture is that the freckles remain as a prominent component of the picture.

I really hate seeing pictures of kids that are mainipulated to look like glamore shots. I want to see every quirky thing that defines a kid as a real live person. This includes freckles, mussed up hair, skinned knees, and dirty faces.

I would much rather see a photo that captures a kid's personality and flaws than a photo of a perfect imaginary kid.
 
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