Separating Color Channels To Fix Faded Black & White Photos

Note that this technique is for photos that are faded evenly.  For photos that are faded in splotches, use one of the other fade-fixing techniques listed on the main page with either a feathered selection, masks or adjustment layers (more advanced techniques that I may deal with in another tutorial).

This procedure assumes that your monitor has been calibrated (Jasc's website has instructions on how to calibrate your monitor).

This tutorial uses the photo of Mrs. Bishop from the Miscellaneous Individuals from Ohio page of my "Antique Store People" section.  For best results, use this .png file (837k).  If that's a little too large for your connection to download in a decent amount of time, you can use this .jpg (38k) file, but be aware that enhancing the photo will also "enhance" all the JPG compression artifacts.

This technique MAY work just as well with dark murky photos (like the tintypes of "Uncle Will" and his wife on the KEMP page of the "Antique Store People") as it will on photos like this one of Mrs. Bishop that have faded too light - I have not had a chance to test it on such photos yet.

1.  Mrs. Bishop has probably been kept out on display somewhere that she was exposed to light regularly and has faded quite a bit as a result.

   
   

2.  Since Mrs. Bishop was a bit crooked in the scanner, the first thing I did was straighten her out.  I first applied a grid to the image (menu itemView > Grid, not available in PSP 4) so that I could tell whether the edges of the photo were straight.  I then rotated her to the right 0.5 degrees (menu item Image > Rotate, ).  Pay careful attention to how the edges of the image (NOT the frame) line up with the grid.  This may take some trial and error and rotation settings will probably be slightly different for every photo you do this to.  When the photo looks as straight as you can get it, remove the grid by going to menu item View > Grid again.

   
   

3. The object here is to split this image into its component color channels to try to find one with fairly good detail. Go to Colors > Channel Splitting (in PSP 4:  Image > Channels > Splitting) and select one of the three color modes (PSP 4 does not offer a choice and will automatically split to RGB mode).  This will create a new greyscale image for each color channel in that mode.  Tile the images if necessary (under the Window menu) so that you can compare them.  All versions of Paint Shop Pro should look and work similarly to the following screenshots.
   •  RGB is the first color mode.  The letters stand for Red, Green, and Blue.  This is a useful color mode for this type of procedure.  In this example, the red and green channels are faded and have little information.  They can be discarded.  The blue channel appears to have retained good detail, so keep it and discard the red and green channels.  (screenshot from PSP 4)

   • HSL is the second color mode.  The letters stand for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.  This color mode can be ignored for this procedure.  The Hue and Saturation channels are not useful to this kind of procedure and can be discarded.  The Lightness channel usually seems to correspond to the greyscale information in an image.  Since this image is faded too light, the Lightness channel is unlikely to be much use here.

   •    CMYK is the third color mode.  The letters stand for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK.  This can also be a useful color mode for this type of operation, but be aware that when you split an image into these channels, they will appear inverted - you'll have to go to Colors > Negative Image for each of them to see what they look like.  In this example, the black channel is so badly faded that it's almost completely gone.  The cyan and magenta channels are also faded, although not nearly as badly as the black channel.  The best of the four appears to be the yellow channel, so keep it and discard the other three.  (screenshots from PSP 5)

     
     

4.  After viewing all the channels in RGB and CMYK mode, I decided that the blue and yellow channels looked the best.  I discarded all the other channels and tiled blue and yellow to compare them.  I decided that the yellow channel had slightly better detail than the blue channel and kept it.  This is a personal judgement call - you use whichever of the channels you thought had the most detail and looked the least faded.  (PSP 4 users will be limited to choosing between the red, green, and blue channels.)

   
   

5.  At this point, the photo still looks a bit gray and washed-out and could use some fine-tuning.  Users of PSP 4, 5 and 6 can use the Highlight/Midtone/Shadow procedure to fine tune the image (I used values of highlight = 80, midtone = 50, shadow = 10 to get the photo to look as shown at left).  Users of PSP 7 may prefer to make final adjustments by using Histogram Adjustment.  The next two steps deal with sepia toning the photo.  If you're happy with it the way it looks at this stage, you can skip the next section.

   
   

6. Go to Colors > Increase Color Depth and select 16 Million Colors (24 bit).  The image must be 24 bit or many of the filters and adjustments will not be available.

   
   

7.  Go to Colors > Colorize (or Shift +L).  Saturation will have to be somewhere well above zero before you notice a color change.  The actual value is up to you - different people will have different tastes.  If you want the photo to appear "sepia-toned", use a Hue somewhere in the range of 20 to 30.  A Hue of between 135 and 150 gives an effect similar to a cyanotype photo.  Play around with both settings until you find a combination you like.  For the photo shown here, I used a Hue of 25 and a Saturation of 50.