Oh Photoshoppers, only you can help me now

[fivemack]

Below the cut, you will find a photo of me as a one-year-old.

Thanks to the foibles of the physical world, this photo is unavoidably 27 years old. It has aged even worse than I have.

My guess is that the cyan channel has almost entirely vanished. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to scale along the cyan (rather than the red, green or blue) axis in GIMP.

Do any of you know of better tools? Can you make me look more like a pink-cheeked, blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby in a garden, and less like a pink-cheeked, blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby at the bottom of a quite deep pool of not very transparent brown gunk?

Even better would be some kind of tool which I could apply to the several albums of photos of that age that Mum has, without too much individual per-photo effort: I'm happy to line up the album, snap away with macro lens and perspective-correct back to photo shape afterwards, but more than tens of minutes per photo I don't think I can manage.

edit: Mum has negatives for these, but it's not clear the colours are very much better on the negatives; I can see reds and greens, but inverse-blues get hidden in the brown of the negative. Also I have no negative-scanner.

Comments

[aldabra]

Aw.

[antinomy.livejournal.com]

How's this?



A bit of fiddling on the colour balance axes, particularly more cyan and blue, and then some HSV fettling, and some Levels fiddling to finish. I'm afraid it's not perfect, and I can't suggests a terribly useful way of automating it - you could use photoshop macro-thingies, but I think it's likely to be terribly subjective image-to-image.

[brrm.livejournal.com]

Here are my two takes on the image. The first is just using Photoshop's "auto levels" command; the second is minor tweaking of colour balance to make it work better to my eye. The image differs markedly on the two monitors, though - and I'm pretty sure I've calibrated them both in Displays. I'll recalibrate and see if that makes a difference. It definitely looks better on my iStalk's built-in monitor, which is where I did the work.

Auto levels:


Further tweaking:

[brrm.livejournal.com]

I forgot to add that 'Auto levels' might be sufficiently close to acceptable that you might be happy with just that, without the extra tweaking afterwards.

[brrm.livejournal.com]

And this is the cheat's method - auto levels, followed by some judicious airbrushing ;-)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

This may be the first time in my life I saw a photo of somebody that young that actually looked, to me, somewhat like the person as an adult!

Here's my 30-second fixup version -- using Applied Science Fiction! Specfically, their "Digital ROC" photoshop plugin. The version in my new scanner is even better, so taking the negative to somebody with a scanner supporting it would probably do even better (I think it gets raw scan info and does clever stuff with it).

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me I didn't address the other part of the question -- cyan is blue+green, so you can get a cyan motion by moving both of those two together. I'm a very light GIMP user, just enough to have a vague idea of what's there so I can talk about it a bit, there may be much better approaches.

[morayallan.livejournal.com]

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

You're just not going to be able to invent colour information where there's none. If the same is true for the negatives, if it were me, I'd just be converting to mono - they're going to look far more natural that way than boosting nonexistent colour information. You could tint (sepia or duotone), and if it's really important, you can hand colour them which will probably give acceptable results. But dropping down to mono is going to be the only relatively automatic solution.

[emperor]

I'd try putting the negatives through a negative scanner...