sometimes you win, sometimes you break even
Other day one of my high school classmates shared a photo from another of our classmates of some classmates from Back In The Day which has been naturally vintaged by time, light, and chemistry. [disclaimer: added bars to the eyes because I did not ask anyone for permission to share this]
Randy, Toby, Vernon, Luis, Donald, Carlos, Anthony
I thought I'd try to contribute to the conversation by fixing the photo, but this turned out not to be as easy as it seems because of the quantity of red this faded into... reduce it as much as would be realistic, and everything turns green and purple. This is what happens when it's not just one color that shifted -- and other than masking the 'fixed' parts for one color to do a second 'fix' for another color in Photoshop, you're pretty much left with:
The fleshtone being somewhat close to natural is what I was after, forget the background. It still has a smidge too much red but that's how it goes, and I can't be arsed to correct the white doorframe and other neon green cast on its own.
If you wondered about using AI or the photo tools for black & white: I did have a look at my toolbag and didn't like the results -- like one app stripped ALL the colors that already existed and recolored the faces in pink tint but not the hands, and another app which usually does a great job of restoring colors on shifted slides wasn't geared to this type of decay so made it worse.
So guys, just tell people you were standing in a light green room and there's an infrared heat lamp behind the camera. :)
