Topic awaiting preservation: Photo correction...

Hey guys... I am doing a little photo color correction, fixing up a few old photos and I need a few opinions. Sun has done alot of damage over the years.
http://www.geocities.com/asmith56789/baby.html -- Isn't she a cheeky one? The top picture is the original sun damaged photo. The bottom is my attemp at correcting it and that is all the further I have gotten. Any suggestions? (And don't hold back.) I am using photoshop 4.

[This message has been edited by Wolfen (edited 12-17-2003).]

Link says the bandwidth has been exceeded Wolfen.

--- check back in an hour... I just use that webspace for my works in progress. It should be back up now.

[This message has been edited by Wolfen (edited 12-17-2003).]

Wolfen: You've done some pretty good job. How did you bring back the green in the background ? Via Image > Adjustments > Variations ?
Whatever, the only improvement I can think of is to slightly desaturate the brighter colors and saturate a little more the green ones.

Mathieu "POÏ" HENRI

Nice work so far It's looking good, depending age of the shot and film type It could pass as it is now.

When color correcting it's important to remeber to pay careful attention to memory color. Colors that people tend to expect to be of a specific value. Flesh, Grass. White are also very important the human mind tend to auto balance to the whites in an image causing us to notice other incorrect colors.

Take your retouched image for example. My first impression is the whites are not quite white yet. The white triggers me to notice that the flesh is not quite right. But on it's own the flesh my be well be correct.

Now for some advice on fleshtones: In general flesh is made up of equal values of Yellow and Magenta. This holds true even across racial types. Cyan is what makes up the majority of racial difference. My personal preferance and I find it works accross most racial types is 2 - 3% more yellow then magenta. But there are no fast rules, but yellow and magenta should be near equal.

Now on to the greens. They look ok at a first glance, but could be better. They appear too yellow to me, giving me that other world feeling. However it could prove diffucult to correct without masking the girl. Now I can't rember what tools were aviable in PS 4. But I would try selective color or maybe perhap hue/saturation if it allows picking a color channel to effect. (PS 7 and maybe 6 has this feature and also you to define the range of effect.)

Using selective channel or H/S pick a color channel to effect. Now the leaves will register as a yellow. Now you say "What, the leaves look green!" Well if you take a reading in CYMK you will see that the leaves have much more yellow then cyan. So there for technically are yellow. To be green it would have to have near equal Yellow and Magenta +- 20% differnce ruffly. You may find you have to slight corrects to the green and cyan channel to help create a smooth transition of colors in the correction. Give it a try and play, it's a useful tool, expecially when combined with ruff masks. The flesh tones may also be corrected in the manor, they should register as a red.

Note: You can adjust each channel in the Selective color, so all moves can be made at one time.

Some addtional advice. You may want to change to CYMK at some point. The first move to remove the red case would have been easyer in RGB. But correcting the flesh tones and greens may prove easyer in CYMK.

Now normally it's not the best to avoid converting from RGB to CYMK and back to RGB again due to a slight quality loss due to the black convertion. But it will not effect the image too badly, just check your CYMK setup, set black generation to light or none. I would suggest light black generation and GCR so you get a slight black channel, It could prove useful for lighting some of the shadows and opening up the image. Just avoid going from RGB to CYMK several times.

Beyound that I would opened up overall as it's bit dark, I would think you could pull a little more detail from the image expecailly if you have a decent high-res scan to work with.


Hope this helps.

J. Stuart J.

jstuartj: Hey thanks for the advice... I might re-do the entire picture and try your suggestions, I am really just playing with it. Even though this might be a christmas present for my parents. The picture is about 24 years old, on cheap photo paper and was sun damaged. You see that cheeky little girl in that picture is me when I was a cub. I was 14 months old when that picture was taken. I figured it would be nice to fix it up in time for christmas.

I agree it is a bit dark and the front is washed out. This is by no means done, but I might re-scan the picture into CMYK and work from there. Again, thanks for the advice.

Here's my go at it. If you'd like the PSD to see what I did, just let me know.

"Nothin' like a pro-stabbin' from a pro." -Weadah

Nax: sure I would like a copy of what you did. asmith56789@yahoo.com -- email me.

I would avoid scanning directly to CYMK, you would only limit your tonal range. Scan at the highest true resolution or the scanner or as large a file as you can stand to work with. I scan at 2400ppi, that is interpolated in scanner to 600ppi at final size. For best results scan in 16bit RGB, Which is sometimes refered in scaning software as 48 Bit (16bit per channel). This will give you a much greater tonal range to begin with.

Also disable any Auto correction on the scanner. A scanner might produce pleasent imagde using it's auto correction, but it will be at a cost of tone range. Gamma in scanner sould be safe as long you you don't go nuts.

J. Stuart J.

[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 12-18-2003).]