Advise, instruction and software choices

[clevet]

I am a volunteer at a museum that holds a large civil war image collection. Much of the collection is fading away and discoloring really bad. I am seeking some advice from the forum here to suggest what steps I may take to bring some of the images back. I have PhotoshopCS6, a epson v700 scanner and SilverfastSE. I am willing to upgrade my silverfast if that move would help. I also would love to find a paid tutor to assist in a few images to start me on the right path. As you can see the images are yellowed quite a bit and some surface stains. There's something there, how do i get to it....Thank you, Claude

[LSI_Ketelhohn]

Dear Claude,

This image really offers a challenge.
In SilverFast 8 you can access several image auto adjustments by holding the auto button for a second.

Bildschirmfoto 2012-09-28 um 11.17.10.png (27.87 KiB) Viewed 1468 times

I suggest you try them to see if any can help you directly.
The strength of the automatic Color Cast Removal (CCR) tool can be controlled in the Histogram's expert settings.

Otherwise you can use the Pipette tool to set the darkest and brightest points in the image.
The neutral Pipette allows you to remove color casts.
At this point Ai Studio might help you as it allows to set 4 measurement points for that pipette instead of just one.

Bildschirmfoto 2012-09-28 um 11.18.44.png (12.92 KiB) Viewed 1468 times

In the Selective Color Correction tool you can find the Automatic Color Restoration (ACR) tool.
This allows to automatically correct bleached out or over saturated images.
The ACR tool should be executed after making all other adjustments!

There are some people providing online tutorage like Mark Segal or Taz Tally.

For local assistance we would need to know where you are located.

kind regards,
Arne Ketelhohn.

[Al Darby]

In the last couple of years, I've been restoring a lot of old photographs (early 1900s) and while they're not as old as yours, I did learn a lot on how to work on them. I have the same hardware and software setup and would be happy to collaborate with you.

A starter might be to upload a hi-res (600ppi - tiff) scan (say to dropbox, or wherever), so we can see in real terms, what we're dealing with.

FWIW, I've found on the really bad ones, most of the work is done in PS, not SF, perhaps Arne would be good enough to PM my email address to you.