Photo partly faded

[DLA]

Hi
I've been asked to improve a photo that's been framed for several years.
Normally this wouldn't be a major problem but unfortunately the photo is a couple of inches bigger than the mount.
As a result the central part of the photo is badly faded whereas there's a inch and a half border that's not.
I thought that if I copy & paste the central faded area to a new document, color-correct it & paste it back... but unfortunately I'm finding it difficult to match my color corrected section with the border of the original photo.
Has anyone got any suggestion? See attached.

[xpatUSA]

Hi
I've been asked to improve a photo that's been framed for several years.
Normally this wouldn't be a major problem but unfortunately the photo is a couple of inches bigger than the mount.
As a result the central part of the photo is badly faded whereas there's a inch and a half border that's not.
I thought that if I copy & paste the central faded area to a new document, color-correct it & paste it back... but unfortunately I'm finding it difficult to match my color corrected section with the border of the original photo.
Has anyone got any suggestion? See attached.

Hello and welcome!

I would use an app that allows editing of a selection only and also allows the selection edge to be "feathered" to make the join less visible.

Then select the faded area and edit away.

The above sounds a bit too obvious, so were you looking for advice about the editing itself?

I did find that moving a blue/yellow color balance slider in the GIMP improved the faded area coloration a lot. I would envisage applying some haze reduction and messing with contrast/brightness to match up roofs (rooves?).

Having the border visible unchanged while adjusting the selection helps a lot!



Good luck!

[DLA]

That's very good. I hadn't considered feathering the edge. I use Affinity Photo so that shouldn't be a problem.
Thank you.

[Round Tuit]

Welcome to CiC.

I agree with the general approach suggested by Ted. I would however use a mask rather than a feathered selection to control where the correction is applied because the transition can be fine tuned by using a brush on the mask. In the example below, I blended the left edge in a couple of minutes on my laptop using my finger on the touchpad which is not exactly the best tool for editing.

Here is the procedure that I followed to make the example:

1. I sampled three points in the faded area that should be neutral, one on the white roof on the left, one on the black roof on the right and one on the pavement. I then applied a curve correction to the blue channel to bring it approximately to the value of the red and green channels.

2. I used a hard black brush on the mask of the curve layer to roughly paint away the correction where the photo was not faded. I then used a small soft brush with a very small flow rate(4%) to fine tune the transition. In this example, I only worked on the left edge of the transition.

3. For the rest of the correction, I raised the mid tone contrast, the 'clarity' or local contrast and applied a fair amount of sharpening.





Hope this is helpful.

[xpatUSA]

Well done, André. More accurate method than with my simple adjustment.

I hope that the Original Poster has those same adjustment options in Affinity.

[Manfred M]

Well done, André. More accurate method than with my simple adjustment.

I hope that the Original Poster has those same adjustment options in Affinity.

Affinity is a fairly decent Photoshop clone and the functionality used in photography matches up quite well.