steve DeMott wrote:
I have some old photos from the 70's that has turned orange over time. I can only assume that the company I used to developed the prints used exhausted chemicals or the wrong chemicals.
I have been digitizing my old photos using my camera to copy the photos.
I have tried to use LM to bring back some of the color with little results.
Can this be fixed fairly easily with a preset and a little tweaking that will give acceptable results or am I SOL?
In case you're wondering that's my wife in the days, as our grandkids say, when we were skinny and I had hair.
Thanks in advance for any and all inputs
I have some old photos from the 70's that has turn... (
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Conventional 'C' prints (silver-halide-based, with dyes coupled into the emulsion and the silver washed out) fade quickly. The yellow, magenta, and cyan dye layers fade at different rates. But when the paper base itself darkens, that is a sign that residual chemicals remained in the paper after processing. That is usually a sign of incomplete fixing, incomplete bleaching, incomplete washing, or failure to use the proper final stabilizer solution (depending on the vintage of the process!).
The quickest way to restore as much color balance as you can achieve is to use a flatbed scanner with Digital ICE with ROC technology. ICE removes spots from surface dust, grit, grime. ROC stands for Restore Original Color, which Epson calls One Touch Color Restoration. That's what it ATTEMPTS to do, with varying results, depending on how much fading has occurred. I find it gets close, and I can tweak a lot easier from there, in Photoshop.
If you just have digital camera images, you can adjust them in Lightroom, Photoshop, or Affinity Photo (etc.) by several different means. Tools such as Auto Color, click balance eyedroppers, color temperature sliders, highlights, whites, shadows, blacks, etc. can help restore a more pleasing look.
I like to copy slides, prints, and negatives with my camera. I record raw images, so I have 16-bit files to play with, and Adobe Camera Raw (Photoshop ACR) or the Lightroom Develop Module (ACR with a better interface) to control everything. I can photograph color negatives, drag the curves backwards (Invert command in photoshop), and adjust each color separately to get the color right. I can photograph black-and-white negatives and invert the image. I can easily pull shadow details from prints that you would not know are there.
When copying color images, adjusting the curves for red, green, and blue channels separately gives you pretty good control over the look of the image.
I've found I can restore pleasing looks to most images, but sometimes, black-and-white conversion is the best option.
Here are a few restorations photographed from film images, which are generally harder to restore if color has faded:
Kodacolor 126 negative from 1967
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Kodachrome slide, from 1983
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Anscochrome slide, from early 1950s
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Kodak Tri-X negative, 1971 (pushed to E.I. 1250)
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