Spot Color Corrections From Water/Sun Damage on Scanned Photo

[coeo1st]

Hello all, I'm new to the forums. I have been using PSP for years (since PSP4 i believe), however I haven't found a solution to my question. I am currently working on restoring a scanned photo of my wife's grandfather from the 70's and unfortunately the photo has some physical damage to it. I have already touched up where the photo had rips/creases/scratches as well as some color correction to the entire photo. My issue now is how do I correct sections of the photo that has sun/water damage? For instance his light blue shirt has yellow staining on the sleeve and chest and the discoloration of the wood shelves. What would be the best way to fix these and which tools/brushes should I use?

[Ken Berry]

Welcome to the forum.

It would be extremely useful if you could add your attachments again since, for me at least, they are not showing. Here are some instructions you should follow for adding images to your posts: https://forum.corel.com/viewtopic.php?p=394704#p394704

[coeo1st]

Thanks for the input. It should be corrected now.

[Jean-Luc]

G-Pa Correction Small.jpg

Your correction is too magenta and the high contrast removed details from the shirt.
What I did:
1. Histogram adjustment layer:
Colors/Red: Low 18
Colors/Green: Low 8
Colors/Blue: Low 45, Gamma 0.64, High 244
2. Merging adjustment layer with image layer (Merge Layer down)
3. Adjust/Hue and Saturation/Hue Map:
Saturation shift: -19
Hue shift: Magenta 324° -> 42°
4. Change to Target Brush:
Paint the yellow staining (or the complete shirt) in Color Mode and Foreground R192 G197 B178

[Jean-Luc]

Shirt correction.jpg

1. Auto Selection on the shirt
2. Change to Target Brush, mode Color, Foreground color R115 G128 B139

[Jean-Luc]

Ken asked me if I could provide more information about the selection.
I think the Auto Selection tool is based partially on luminosity contrast (difference between high and low luminosity values) and also on color difference. Probably a mix of the two. I must say I was surprised when the Auto Selection tool was able to select exactly what I wanted! The refine is made manually with the Freehand Lasso tool.
See the videos.

Auto Selection.zip

Lasso tool.zip

[Cold Jack]

Jean-Luc, thank you for highlighting the "target" tool which can be used to rectify mistakes made by the AI auto colourising tool that I use.

I will definitely check out your book.

Thanks again.

Jack

[Jean-Luc]

Hi, Jack
what is the AI auto colourizing that you use?

[Cold Jack]

Hello, there Jean.

I use Color Surprise by Pixbim; it does a good job of picking colours from different shades of grey in a B&W photo.

They offer a free trial that can be downloaded and run from your computer.

The project I'm working on is a WWII pocket B&W photo album that was carried by my father. Many of the photos are damaged, water-stained, or creased and torn making it hard for AI to restore them.

I use PSP to work on the B&W images and try to restore them as they were originally taken.

Then I drop them into Color Surprise to get a coloured version almost instantly. Usually, the first output is good enough to save with editing but occasionally I have to go back to PSP to edit the colours by hand.

I'm not sure if Color Surprise is truly 100% AI but it saves me a lot of time and the colour photos of Great, Great Grandad and Grandma seem to have sparked interest from the younger generation.

I'm glad to have found this forum.

Best regards

Jack

[Jean-Luc]

Hi, Jack
I see on the Pixbim website that they use AI for various applications. Color Surprise seems to me to provide a good result.
Thanks for this information, which could be useful to other users!