I thought this would be easy, but...

[Jo Ann Snover]

I'm struggling a bit with repairing an image that had what appeared to be a fade or chemical damage that left it light and with yellow faces. I figured a few apply image operations in a channel or two and I'd be all set, but I'd like some assistance as I can't seem to fix this.

Click on the thumb for a larger before/after showing where I am.



I have tried using apply image in RGB mode, LAB and CMYK, hoping it would be easier to see and fix the damaged channel(s). The best of the bunch so far was done in CMYK. I used a Getty Images test image - which has models of three ethnicities and a bunch of colored objects - as a reference to see how the channels should look on something that was OK.

For yucks, I looked at the Jacob's ladder tutorial and tried that, but I don't think it helped much for this image, so I backed off from that approach.

I'm hoping there's something obvious I've missed, but would appreciate some pointers.

[Jo Ann Snover]

I thought this was perhaps interesting and useful in seeing the damage (click on thumb for larger)



Using an action provided here to help using the Jacob's Ladder technique, which makes a small sample image showing the three channels in LAB mode, I compared the color accurate Getty test image with the damaged one I'm trying to fix. The sequence is Color-Lightness-a-b

It seems to me it's the a* channel that's really messed up - although Lightness is too light as well.

If this doesn't help see the problems better, then never mind :)

[Mhayes]

JoAnn, I think you have done an amazing job so far and interesting to see how you approached it. I would go back and maybe clean up some things like the sign with her name on it to get rid of the smudges. Family is going to be happy to be minus the green.  :up:

Margie

[Hannie]

Jo Ann, you have done a beautiful job so far! (13 restores for the price of 1  ;))

Perhaps you can reduce some of the yellow by using a Color Balance layer and move the yellow slider a tad to the right?  Also in  a Selective Color adjustment layer in the Reds you could move the yellow slider a little to the left and the red and cyan slider some to the right.

Great job,

Hannie

[Jo Ann Snover]

Thanks for the suggestions Hannie - I did finish the work by doing the dust and schmutz cleanup and a little fine tuning on the colors.

When the channels are as damaged as these were (and I wonder what happened; my guess is that some of them were home printed items from the banding I could see and perhaps those inks getting wet reacted differently from a traditional chemical process print) color balance adjustment layers didn't work at all up front, although they did help a bit after the apply image steps had largely fixed up the channels.

Here's a small version of the finished version