color suggestions

[Dawn G]

This was not an easy one. I have already turned it in, but I was interested in any comments on the facial color or any thing else.

Thanks,
Dawn

[Johnboy]

Dawn,

This one certainly was not easy. The most noticeable thing to me was when I scrolled down to first view the restore, the gentleman on the viewer left looked to have a head that is too big for his body. When I compare it with the original I think the his left side is too big. It just gives me the impression that the head was copied from another photo and placed on the body. To me it just doesn't look natural. The green channel has good detail of this man's head.

Looking in the green channel the tables appears to be bare. So I am not sure it has a covering.

There is green in the woman's dress and I think it may be white. This could be a wedding snapshot. When I used your original to do a curves color correction the first white point showed up in the lower part of the dress. Maybe making the dress a selection and doing a Color Balance adjustment layer to add in some magenta may help lessen the green in the dress. There may be other ways also.

Hope this helps.

Johnboy

[glennab]

Hi Dawn

About the best I could do was try to pull out a little more detail.  I agree with JB that the gentleman on our left looks disproportionate.  You're basically trying to make a restoration out of what I'd call an "impossible," so it'll be a stretch to try to make this work.  I don't know if you'd be better off to take a B&W like the one I'll post here and then add a bit of color or leave it without color.  Because of the blobs in the original, I'm not sure I'd bet on the color of anything.

This image was generated by converting to CMYK, creating an alpha channel by mixing gray and cyan with Calculations, creating a layer with the alpha channel and then burning a little more detail in the light areas of that layer.  I converted it back to RGB, flattened and then adjusted levels a bit to even out the "tones" if you can call them that.

This may be worth nada, but I'll post it anyway, just to give you another perspective.  BTW, please be sure to remove the personal information from the file and re-post it.  This happens to be one of the few I've seen recently with all the info still there.

For what it's worth...





GK

[Hannie]

Hi Dawn,

First thing I want to say is that you are a hero for even picking a photo that has this much damage!
I can see how much you have done to get rid of all this damage and make it look clean again.

Perhaps it is an idea to follow Glenna's example and work in B/W, not worry too much about making it look like new but merely clean up some of the obvious damage and just leave the rest as it is?  (There are no reference photos of the man on the right, he can remain blurry.)

:up2:

Hannie

[Dawn G]

Thank you for all your extra hard work and suggestions. I can see by your comments that I have a lot to learn about restoration techniques.

I'm going to give it another try to get the man on the left looking more proportional and the color more in balance.

I've been working on this for a while. I hope Hannie, that a few more days won't be a problem.

Thanks again,
Dawn

[Hannie]

Dawn it isn't a problem if you need more time! 
As far as learning is concerned, we all have a lot more to learn!  Don't forget that none of us would go near that photo with a ten feet pole!

:loveit:

Hannie

[Mhayes]

Dawn, I agree with what has been said and I wouldn't have wanted to do this one. You are brave for trying and don't get discouraged as there is only so much you can bring back. Glenna's example is as good as you could hope for.

On your next one, maybe you would like something a littler easier?  :)

Margie