Blue channel challenge

[Atlantis]

When I picked this baby I hoped the blue channel would give me more clues.





But set to either luminosity



or soft light



or without the blue channel layer after the initial colour corrections and some patching



it only gives a little extra information on the parts of the blanket close to the better visible center and it leaves me almost clueless on the outer borders of the photo.
So I guess I could use some alternative ideas on how to continue this restore.

[kiska]

Crop, crop, crop... to the original dimensions. I'm assuming a 6x4?

[Atlantis]

Cropping might be the best solution but I was hoping for a magical creative eye  :D
I will try to recover some more info beneath the damage before I contact Tess.

[Tess (Tassie D)]

I'd go with the crop unless you just fill out the blanket the baby is laying on with available pattern and use perspective correction to get it looking ok.

[Atlantis]

Gradually trying to fill in the blanks to get a nice crop by going back and forth to the partly healed blue channel:



Somehow I never manage to master colorising the repaired parts of a blue channel layer. So I combine patching and cloning, copying and warping to get as close to what might have been with that blue channel as a reference.

[glennab]

Hi Atlantis

I realize I'm coming in on this a bit late, but one of the things I do if I don't get much information from the blue channel is to duplicate the file and convert it to CMYK or LAB.  Often other color spaces will give you a usable channel that won't appear in RGB (LAB is a last resort for me - usually CMYK is the best chance of getting information).

This stinker is one of the reasons I haven't been on the forum much.  I still have to gain a little more brain power - especially after the idiocy of trying to do an "impossible" when I wasn't quite up to it yet - before I'm ready to tackle another restoration.  So I try to jump in with what I hope is helpful feedback in the meantime.

Cheers!
GK

P.S. for anyone who has been in OPR long enough to know how I came by my initials, I just discovered that there's a rum on the market called "Kracken."  I don't drink, but I may have to buy a bottle just for fun and to remind me of my good buddy AussiMax, who stuck me with the moniker in our early days, and whose presence I miss. We e-mail each other once in a while, and he's doing okay, other than hating the ravages of getting older.  So we commiserate!