Restoration of a 30 year old color print

RK
Posted By
Richard_Kaiser
Dec 11, 2006
Views
346
Replies
4
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Closed
Am I in the right forum? I’m requesting help with restoration of a scanned print using Photoshop CS.

A fragment (about 5%) of the image can be seen at <http://home.att.net/~rrkaiser/RAK_22_Marian_fragment.tif>
The image was scanned from a commercially produced print, about 30 years old.

Look at the water area. You’ll note easy to see "red spots". They are pretty much everywhere in the print. Not so terrible to prevent my using this image BUT… I’d sure be happy if there was a not-too-time consuming way to make them go away. Using the healing brush or the like on them individually IS more time than I want to spend.

(I’ve looked at what’s in Eismann’s "…Restoration & Retouching" and didn’t find it helpful. I have the idea that if the right things were done to the red channel a corrective mask might be generated… That’s as far as I can take the idea…)

Any ideas?
Thank you for your time and help,

Richard Kaiser
Related Tags
color old print restore

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Arnor Baldvinsson
Dec 11, 2006
Hi Richard,

The image was scanned from a commercially produced print, about 30 years old.

Look at the water area. You’ll note easy to see "red spots". They are pretty much everywhere in

Are these spots on the original print or just on the computer image? I.e. is this a bad original print or a bad scanning job? I’m fairly new to this game so my way of doing this would be with the clone stamp. If this is only 5% of the whole image and it all shows these red spots, then it would take a while<g> I’m interested to see what others would suggest as I’m always trying to learn new methods:)

—
Arnor Baldvinsson
San Antonio, Texas
GD
glen_deman
Dec 11, 2006
Here’s one approach:

1) Make your selection:

You can make the selection as accurate as you want (pen tool), but because you’re trying to get rid of the red spots, none of which are too close to the people, you can probably get away with a quick selection made with the lasso tool (which is what I did).

The idea is to mask the people, so that only the background is affected.

2) Add a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer. The selection will automatically be converted into a mask for this adjustment layer.

I took out the red and replaced it with a lot of green and a bit of blue.

3) Here’s how it looks with the adjustment layer.
RK
Richard_Kaiser
Dec 12, 2006
Very, very nice. I’ve been fiddling to see if I can find the right levels for the blue and green channels and am surprised at my success. It’s a significant improvement.

Thank you.

It’s a partial solution since the "red spots" are everywhere in the picture. Fairly easy to see in the woman’s arm and hair, for example.

Any ideas for those portions of the picture? I sure don’t like what I get when I use a "no-red to red channel mixer " on those areas.

Thanks again,
Dick Kaiser
DB
Dennis_Brody
Dec 13, 2006
For the spots in the arm, a simple application of the Cloning tool should work. DB~

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