Help with restoring badly sun faded photgraph

[chetna]

Hi,

I have joined this community and see that there is tons I can learn from it. I use photoshop on an ad-hoc basis and find my way around it each time I need to do something.

However, I am faced with a challenge at this point. I have agreed to restore some photos for a friend, however the one photo is faded really badly. In addition the initial quality of the picture doesn't seem to be great and I have scanned the photo so that I can work with it. Here it is:



Can anybody help and give me steps to follow to try and restore this to a more acceptable level?

Many thanks,
Chetna

 

[chrisix]

all colors are messed up, would need to recolor the entire thing

 

[Tom Mann]

It's not quite that bad, Chris. For some reason, the background faded differently from the subject, but if you treat each area separately, it's not all that hard to make a reasonable repair.

First, do whatever you want with the background. Since I wasn't sure what its true color actually was, I simply desaturated it.

Next, select out the subject and do 3 separate levels adjustment on it: one for each of the three channels. First, as shown in the attached image, move the end-point sliders for each of the three channels till they touch the ends of the respective histograms. Once you have done this, go back and tweak the three midpoint (gamma) sliders for a good skin color.

Once the color looks good, I increased the contrast of the skin areas using a pass with medium radius USM.

The above procedure is probably the technique I use most frequently for heavily faded photos.

BTW, one caution: Unlike a lot of other "fixes", either don't ingest the image through ACR, or, if you do, don't make any color or tonality adjustments in ACR. At most just use ACR for a bit of quick and dirty noise reduction (which is what I did for this image).

HTH,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

... and you get something like this:

 

[chrisix]

hmm, that looks good

however, I would still go for a full recolor if you want it to look neat

 

[Zeealex]

all colors are messed up, would need to recolor the entire thing

I like Recolouring things!

i'll have a go later if all is well.

 

[chetna]

Thanks All!

That touch-up looks really good, Tom. Thanks explaining how to do it!

Will also have to try the recolouring route... Thanks Chris!

 

[Tom Mann]

Chris: "...however, I would still go for a full recolor if you want it to look neat..."

Yup. However, I'll often start a recoloration effort by first trying to tease out any info that might be in the original, and, if it's reasonable, then use that to guide the subsequent re-coloration effort, possibly even blending some of the tweaked original in with the re-colored version to give it more of an organic feel.

T

 

[Tom Mann]

PS - Chetna, upon re-reading my earlier post, I realize that I forgot to mention to you that I performed some noise reduction and spotting of imperfections before I started the process of making the mask and tweaking the levels sliders.

T

 

[ALB68]

Open this in Camera Raw first and start by adjusting your white point. Then play with the Tint and Temperature sliders. You can also open a curves adjustment. Tweak it however you want, take it over to PS and make further corrections. Here is what I got.

 

[iDad]

Hey LB, I would take the finished image that you posted there ^ duplicate it and the top layer I would put in color mode try that you'll see what happens