Any Tips For Restoring Faded Images

[rpcrowe]

I have been tasked by the Important One (my wife) to restore multiple color images from the 1970's which are really in terrible shape...

They are mostly drugstore prints that have faded out and which also have very strong color casts. In fact, many of them seem to have very little of the original color left.

I have been working with levels and curves which is O.K for some but cannot reproduce the original colors in most...

These images are of my daughter and she is turning 50 in April. My wife wants to do a photo book of her life.

My wife is quite sensitive regarding my daughter's skin colors in these images.

My solution for some of the worst images is to change them into monochrome but, my wife is against doing this.

Any solutions? I will have about 50-100 images to work with.

Scanning them in batches and applying Crop and Straighten will give me individual images which I can import into Photoshop CC...

I also have Lightroom available but, I have not worked with that and would prefer to do most of the conversions in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CC...

[ST1]

Richard I would be tempted to open one of the scanned images using Lightroom. To try the Auto tone setting in the develop module. Hopefully this Auto tone will give you a reasonable starting point. From there you could take the image into PS using the keyboard shortcut ( CTrl and E, CMD E on a Mac) to continue with your processing.



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[DanK]

I had to do this when I put together slide shows for my kids' weddings. I can't say I did it very well. However, for what little my experience is worth, I think it is helpful to separate this into two stages. The first is removing the color cast, which in the case of many of mine was vaguely tan. I would do this first. If you have something in the image that should be white, you can make big strides with the white balance eyedropper tool in LR or ACR. Beyond that, there are several methods using photoshop, all of which I have forgotten in the years since their weddings. However, if you search for "remove color casts photoshop" without the quotes, you will find lots of methods.

Once that is done, you can tend to the lack of saturation and contrast without worsening the color cast. This part is easier, IMHO. I would do it in Photoshop because it gives you the ability to make tonality adjustments not only by color channel (which LR offers for its curve tool), but also separately for luminosity using a luminosity blend mode.

None of my efforts were masterpieces, but they were good enough that people paid attention to the images rather than the degradation.

[Manfred M]

I did a great deal of this type of work in a colour management course I took at a local college some years ago. Doing it well takes time and effort. Physical damage, faded colour (which is not even or consistent), yellowing and contrast (global and mid-tone). It was one of the exercises on our final exam.

I suspect that there are some good YouTube videos out there that would be quite effective and there are some good books as well. I would highly recommend Katrin Eismann's book "Restoring & Retouching". She is a well regarded authority on the subject and is one of the Kelby One instructors.

https://www.katrin-eismann.com/#/books/

Like anything else, you can either do a quick job or a good job. It depends on how much effort you are willing to put into it.

[rpcrowe]

Thanks for your help... I appreciate it...

Here is an image without any correction applied...


Here is the image as I like it; corrected using a combination of levels, NIK Viveza and Portrait Pro...


However, my wife doesn't like the color since our daughter had more of a ruddy complexion, This is what my wife likes more...


Of course - I will go along with my wife's desires "Happy Wife - Happy Life"

Actually, I prefer this image in B&W but, my wife hates monochrome...

[DanK]

I sometimes resort to B&W if I can't get colors right.

Re #3: there is no arguing, but that looks highly unnatural to me, as though your daughter were wearing fluorescent paint. I think the problem may be the unevenness of the degradation that Manfred mentioned. In #2, there appear to be uneven red and yellow tints, and boosting either of those colors for other regions will make those look extreme.

[rpcrowe]

An advantage to this project is that I am learning some techniques which can be used in other editing modes.

As an example, scanning numerous images, then opening up the scan in Photoshop CC... FILE > AUTOMATE > SCAN AND STRAIGHTEN IMAGES will result in each image being cropped and opened up as an individual file. This process saves a lot of time over scanning each image individually...