Two cute kids

[Lynnya]

Mornin all...

starting on this one.. should be easy (famous last words).. this is my color correction using levels, auto curves then new layer, difference blend mode then threshold to find the first black pixels which are actually neutral gray..they were on the front of his hat..seems to be a green cast on the plastic ring to my left..

[Shadow]

Good morning Lynn. Looking good. Funny last words indeed    I think you have a good color correction. The skin tones look great! As for the floatie ... do you think maybe it was some shade of green originally?

[Jo Ann Snover]

I'm forever in search of the perfect way to fix the yellow-red faded look on old photos, and although I haven't found it, I think your current  color is a little on the blue-ish side and I'll share what I came up with which uses a combination of methods (including some of the ones you used). I'm not 100% happy, but see what you think. (Click on thumbnail for larger version)



If you want to take a look at the PSD file (it's small) there are layer comps to step through each part of the correction so you can explore.

I started with a screen grab from your post and first used auto color correction with curves, but with two changes. One is that I made a selection of part of the image I wanted to use for finding the white and black points - I wanted to include only the important parts (judgment call). The other is that I used the auto options to select Find dark and light colors (which isn't the default). You can see I also have my highlight/shadow clipping values lower than the default of 0.10% as well.

You can just shift-click on the layer mask to see the changes across the whole image.

The second step was the channel mixer layer to fix the faded red channel and lighten the blue channel a little (sometimes just the channel mixer is enough, but I didn't get good results this time).

Then I added a curves adjustment layer set to multiply mode to darken (a little) some of the foreground highlights

Next was to use the difference mode way to find a gray point (I have an action that makes the layers) and I experimented with several of the options - the boy's hat, the inflatable (gray part) and the cloth on top of the picnic basket in the shade. I liked the inflatable better than the hat - but this is clearly very subjective. I masked (with light gray) the faces and skin, plus the red-ish shirt as they were a bit too cold

[Lynnya]

Thanks Jo Ann for taking the time to do all that.. it's very interesting.. I do love to see how others practice their craft.. I'm exploring the pdf.. 

o.k. mixing up some of Jo Ann's ideas and my messing here is what I've come up with..

[Shadow]

Thanks Jo Ann. I too like to see how others practice their craft.
Lynn, looks good! 

[Lynnya]

Thanks Lyn.. they've gone home and approved... phew!

[Shadow]

That family will be happy to have those cuties back home. Way to go Lynn!

[Mhayes]

Nice job Lynn and thanks Jo Ann for the helpful tutorial. I like to bookmark great examples and tutorials so that I can refer back to them later. It safes having to weed through the Forum in search of them.

Margie

[Hannie]

Great topic, the colors are getting much better!
In the shade there usually is some purple but in this image there is a little too much of it, you can see it in the boys hat and inflatable toy.

Top photo, I increased saturation of red, green and lowered purple.
Also changed the hue of yellow a little toward green (Selective Color layer)
Upped Vibrance as well.

Hannie

[Lynnya]

Thanks for input Hannie.. I keep forgetting about vibrance... geez.. used to use it all the time..

[Shadow]

Lynn, really enjoyed the process with this gem. Wow! These color shifts are tricky little devils.    Thanks!
Hannie, thank you for the tips. Very helpful. I too forget about Vibrance.