Color correction and sharpening scans

wellman

I've scanned some 8x10s of my Mom and Dad on their honeymoon. The color has shifted quite a bit, and I'd like to color-correct them. Trouble is most of my "color" experience has come from adjusting the WB point of my RAW files, not "unshifting" a faded image. The "Auto levels" in PSE2 seems too aggressive to me, so I'm looking for some how-to advice. The photos are in the gallery linked here.

Also, I purposely scanned these w/o the scanner driver performing an unsharp mask. So now I need to sharpen. USM settings in the neighborhood of 300/0.3/0 usually work pretty well for my digital photos, but it looks like I need something more agressive on these scans. Any tips? Thanks!

Scotty_R

Greg,

It would be very helpful if you would post some larger images of your folks. The ones posted on the site are so small that it's difficult to manipulate them and see the actual results of the processing. To my eyes they don't seem to have a huge color cast that couldn't be easily fixed, but larger images would be nice to work with.

wellman

Scotty_R wrote:

Greg,

It would be very helpful if you would post some larger images of your folks. The ones posted on the site are so small that it's difficult to manipulate them and see the actual results of the processing. To my eyes they don't seem to have a huge color cast that couldn't be easily fixed, but larger images would be nice to work with.

Sorry - the originals are there for download, but you have to hover over the image for a second for the Save icon to come up. SmugMug's large size is still pretty small for these portraits.

edgework

The question is how far you want to go. These can be revived, but there's no quick fix.



This started with some RGB adjustment, took a trip into LAB and then back to RGB. It's actually a fairly straightforward workflow, if you've read Margulis' books, but it's not the kind of thing you'll be able to do with auto-anything. However, it didn't require any precision masks either.

I'll post the layers, if you'd like.

wellman

edgework wrote:

The question is how far you want to go. These can be revived, but there's no quick fix.

This started with some RGB adjustment, took a trip into LAB and then back to RGB. It's actually a fairly straightforward workflow, if you've read Margulis' books, but it's not the kind of thing you'll be able to do with auto-anything. However, it didn't require any precision masks either.

I'll post the layers, if you'd like.

I'm not able to use LAB due to being on good old Elements 2. Thanks, though!

wellman

Well, here's my best go of it. Did some manual leveling and tinkered with USM settings - I finally settled on somewhere around 150/2/4 for most of the shots. Before-and-afters here...

colourbox

The "Auto levels" in PSE2 seems too aggressive to me, so I'm looking for some how-to advice.

Auto Levels will get you nowhere. But if you use Auto Color in manual mode, it might get you there...see this article.