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

[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: