Help needed - to recolor 90 year old image!

T

theotherleft

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My step-grandmother just celebrated her 100th birthday and we're putting together a photobook of images from her life together with some from the celebration that just took place. The image below is of her some(!) years ago and I'd like to include it but with better colour - this seems both faded and false in its colour.

Can anyone advise what steps I need to take in photoshop (CS3) to get a more normal colour (I tried auto color which sorted the greens but the brighter colours were still wrong)?

525.jpg
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thanks
Dean
 
I had a (very) quick play, but this isn't my sort of thing really! Here's my go:



I can't for the life of me get the skin tone right, trying to get it over-saturates the dress.....hmm, I'll keep going!

Chris
 
Yep, that's roughly where I got to! I'm hoping someone can offer some additional insights.
 
Had a quick try
3290957245_f9203be36a_o.jpg
 
As the pic has obviously been hand-tinted, I dont think its just a case of trying to re-saturate to bring out the colour... the colours will always look too oversaturated.

Needs someone who knows what theyre doing here, might be up CT's street, this one! ;)
 
The problem is there was no colour film when this was taken - not available to the public anyway, so this was hand tinted, and time has faded it as you'd expect. While it's far from a bad job, the colours probably never looked really natural in the first place, so just playing with the contrast and saturation should get you a decent result - chris has done a fair job I'd say.

I've tried altering the colour balance to daylight temp and it just looks unnatural, so short of desaturating the image to mono and hand colouring it from scratch, I don't think you'll improve on it substantially.
 
Chris just draw tight masks around the skin areas and desaturate to mono. You'll stand more chance doing a fresh low opacity colour fill then within the masks, but skin tones can be a sod.
 
Quick job.the dress is obviously pink so I'd avoid oversaturating and losing that colour. The whole pic really wants reducing to mono and doing from scratch but that's a pretty big job.

3291036243_5e83ca5828_o.jpg
 
Thanks for that guys. With 50 scanned B+W prints with loads of artefacts to tidy up for this album, I'll resist the option to go to mono and re-color this one, especially as every step would be new to me! The sort of result CT has achieved would be great.

CT - would you mind sharing the steps that you took in PS, as I'm struggling to replicate that with my basic skills on my full size copy?

thanks
Dean
 
Well overall it's just a question of playing with contrast and saturation until you get an acceptable looking colour.

The problem is getting the skin tones, so draw a tight mask around each skin tone area. keep it accurate and don't feather it.

Desaturate within the mask to black and white. Lighten the area in the mask slightly to take the colour better.

Apply a low opacity fill within the mask so the underlying face is still visible. Go for a lightish pink initially, you can then play with the red green and blue sliders to get a decent flesh tone.

Repeat for face, arm and legs. Take your time - it's not easy. (y)
 
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