Colorizing

[berguy100]

Hello everyone, I have recently colorized a picture for a woman in her 80's the picture is of her 1.5 year old daughter. I was using Paint shop pro X6 and a Wacom virtuoso 5 tablet. The original was an 8x10 which was creased, stained, shot in a 35 mm at 400 asa at this enlargement it was very grainy. After many hours I was able to get a relatively good result, she was very satisfied but I thought I could have done better. The reason is that because of the grain the fingers were dark (more grain than actual skin tone) and the picture was taken with a bulb flash which rendered the girls dress darker on one side. When coloring in the tones of color I was not able to have the dress looking like originally the dress looked like, it was faint to one side and dark to the other.
How would I be able to make this look better, I did use Noise Ninja, it helped but not well enough. When trying to clone the skin from another part of her hand that was ok, I would lose the integrity of the finger. As for the dress I can only think that I would have to basically paint it and draw in the creases of the dress.

I thank you in advance for any help, tips or links to help me out.
Best regards

Guy

[Kathy_9]

A lot of editing/re-touching is trial and error and depends on the image in front of you as I am sure you know.

Here's a thought for the finger issue you mentioned "I would lose the integrity of the finger". Try cloning onto a new raster layer, instead of the image itself, so that you can play with opacity and blend modes to try and get the result you are looking for.

[MarkZ]

Have you tried the colour changer tool - same location as flood fill? When you use this tool the textures and nuances of the original colour are retained. Because it acts on the whole image, you may want to select each area you are changing. You can pick the colour you want from another part of the image and try to apply it elsewhere. The creases of the dress should be retained. Play around with the controls for the tool such as tolerance as well.

Colour replacer is another tool but I think it does not give the results you are looking for.