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A Backdoor Restoration
27 February 2024
Restoring old photos has always been challenging. But who isn't up for a challenge? And these days, armed with even more powerful retouching tools, the odds are shifting in our favor.
Restored. Our final crop of the colorized version.
We took a phone snapshot of an old print from the late 1960s the other day to share with our family. Despite all the compositional photography in the phone, the color, though accurately depicting the print, was pretty bad (as you can see below).
You can correct color in post production, of course, but you can only push it so far before you have to start, well, painting.
We pushed and pushed but we couldn't get creditable color. When we neutralized the color by clicking on a white shirt, we lost any color in the faces. Even clicking Auto color corrections didn't color the faces.
The image just looked monotone.
Original. Faded colors, green color cast.
Which gave us a clue. Why not optimize the tones in a merely black and white version of the image?
So we did that. But, of course, there wasn't going to be any color in the faces doing that either.
That's when we reached into Photoshop's back of neural tricks. We've been impressed with its Colorize filter so we tried that to recolor the image -- and bingo the image came to life again.
It may have been a backdoor route to restoring color to the image but the color was credible. And not just credible. It was also an accurately match of the color of the clothing in the original print.