Need a bit of advice on Colour Cast

I have loads of negatives which I've scanned, which are 30 to 40 years old. Most of them are suffering from colour cast, mostly Green and Blue. Can anyone recommend any good software to fix the colours properly?

I've seen various ways of doing it, but my trusty PSP7 and 9 are not up to the job, and Gimp is not easy to use.

Any help Please?

 

I use Photoshop Elements and it handles colour correction quite well. The colour correction facility on my Epson scanner can be quite effective too.

 

Hello,
What version of Windows do you have on your PC?
I have an old version of Photoshop you can upload....cannot upload to windows 7 & 8.


Nick

 

I used a free trial version of something called iirc Lightbox to good effect. Works on Win 8 ok.

 

I'll second that.

 

I'm on XP, so that's why I can't run anything very new, thanks to the Microsoft Mafia!

I have Photoshop Pro 7 & 9, but the newer versions have the better tools to fix pictures. I saw a tutorial on YouTube, sowing how to fix Colour Cast, using a negative colour to remove the colour shift in one go. The results looked better than the automatic way, or by altering the colour gradients.

 

This is the sort of thing I'm trying to fix. The sky has gone blue, even on an overcast day.

 

Quick 'n' Dirty attempt in Photoshop, but using fairly basic features that **should** be available in PaintShopPro:—



Any good?

 

Yep, now I'll post the next 3000 negs, which I've scanned, and another 5000 plus yet to do!

The way I saw was to make a negative, and reduce it to the average single colour, and add it back to the picture.

How did you do yours?

 

This is one of the Green ones. Touching up I can do, but this colour shift in my old negs, which have been stored in a dark cool place, is really maddening.

 

Slightly differently...

Select an area which **should** be white using the eyedropper - this sets the foreground colour to that of the 'cast.
Click on the colour palette & find the LAB numbers. Change A & B to minus their value (if they're already minus make 'em positive) accept & close. This now sets the foreground to the 'negative' of what it was.
Create a new layer & flood fill it with the adjusted foreground colour
Change the layer Blend Mode to 'Hue'
Adjust the layer transparency until you're happy.

I used a layer filled with LAB; 77,25,8 (which is a light pink) set to 50% opacity.

I'll try it with your green one using the wagon door stripe as the reference.

 

I tried it using the patch over the top of the door & also with the bit of sky above the L/H telegraph pole, but using the wagon stripe as the White Point seemed to give the best result.

Pete.

 

What is a LAB number?

 

It's another colour space, but with a greater gamut than either CMYK or RGB. If you open the colour palette you **should** see it along with RGB & possibly HSL too.

There's some more info here, about halfway down the page.

P.

 

Photoshop's "Auto Colour Correct" can be quite effective at dealing with all but the worst colour casts. The method described by K14 is an alternative one and one that works with more severe colour casts.

 

My versions of PSP have HSL, CMYK and RGB, but no LAB.

 

All is not lost... there appears to be an alternative method... try this:

Set the foreground colour to the cast colour using the eyedropper on something that should be white.
Create a new layer & flood fill it with the foreground colour.
Go: Layers>New Adjustment Layer>Invert. Click OK.
Flatten the Adjustment Layer & the flood-filled layer so that you're back to two layers.
Set the layer blend mode to 'hue' & adjust opacity to taste.

P.