Advice on Restoring "True Colors" to 35-Year-Old Photos?

[astrostu]

For my parents' upcomming 35th wedding anniversary (in 2 months), I want to fix up all their wedding photographs from oh-so-long-ago, re-print them, and make a new album.

I already have the photos scanned in at 300 dpi, and my question is how to go about restoring the original colors since they're pretty faded. I consider myself a reasonably adept PhotoShopper, but I've never gone about trying to do something like this.

 

[Garbz]

use an extra layer. One of the modes allows you to add colour to the image. Can't remember which one off hand though. But the result is you literally pain colour onto it. It may help if you completely kill the faded colour and desaturate the background.

 

[astrostu]

So you're saying that I'm effectively going to have to re-paint all the color to what I assume was the original?

 

[EOS_JD]

use an extra layer. One of the modes allows you to add colour to the image. Can't remember which one off hand though. But the result is you literally pain colour onto it. It may help if you completely kill the faded colour and desaturate the background.

Copy the background layer so you are not working on the original file.

If you still have some color in the image use the color selector to get the color you require and then switch to the paint brush and on the bar along the top set the blending mode to color. Now when you paint on the image you'll paint that color and retain the detail below.

Try it and play around to see how it works. getting the right colours can be difficult.

 

[Garbz]

Yes unfortunately there's no way to automagically restore the missing colour. You could bump the saturation but most probably you'd just end up with an ugly photo.