This is my favorite topic of the series.

Old (analog) photos will most likely have lost their color, due to the exposure to UV rays. Those rays wear down the pigments and there is loss of color. The other phenomenon that happens is that the contrast in the photo slowly fades as well, since the pigments aren’t as bright as they were when the photo was first printed.

Reds become oranges or yellows, yellows become off-white… and blues turn to purple, if not some other color. It is not possible to know exactly what color will fade into what other color, but we know they change and part of the restoration of a photo is color and levels correction.

Before going any further, I will make a very important comment about my proficiency with Lightroom and tonal curves. I rarely use it and wouldn’t be able to use it properly if I had to edit the tone curve of the three different channels separately. As such, I only use the pre-established tone curve adjustments provided by Lightroom, and even then only in the main adjustment.

In my previous post relating to photo restoration, it was quite visible the color difference between the original scanned photo and the final edit (if you haven’t read it, click here to read the post). That post is about texture on the printed paper, but the reason for color correction in the restoration process is very visible.

Skin tones are very difficult to restore. In the photo above, I really tried to find the right skin tone, but it’s still significantly wrong. It is a gigantic improvement from the original scan of the photo, but it still needs a lot of work.

To work the colors in Lightroom, I start with the white balance (as you always should), since that gives the overall tone of the photo. Try to find something you know (or suspect) to be white and work with that. Work with the white balance to make the colors correct, only add any “editorial coloring” after you’ve hit the right colors for photo.

The next step is to find the other colors you know of and adjust with the HSL sliders. The HSL sliders allow you to select a color and play with it. It does affect the whole image, so if you slide a red too far to one side, all the reds in the photo will be affected. These are the sliders I need to play with when I have photos that I used a CPL filter with blue skies. Whatever I see on the screen rarely translates well to print. For the print version (I create a virtual copy of the photo) I edit the blues to make sure it will print better (more on that in a separate post).

If you click on the little cog on the top left side of the slider, the mouse will become a “selection” type cursor that will allow you to select the color you wish to edit. Once you press the left button of the mouse, hold it down and move the mouse up and down to edit that combination of colors. A red is rarely just a red, there will likely be some pixels slightly more orange, yellow or even magenta. As you move the mouse up or down, Lightroom will add or subtract from the hue, or saturation or luminance – it depends on which tab is opened. I always start the color editing in the hue tab, unless I am sure the issue is luminance or saturation – which in the case of restoration, it rarely is.

As of this version of Lightroom (12.3 Release), masking doesn’t allow the same level of color tweaking as you do the whole image, but it does allow you do to some of it.

The “Color” sliders help you tune the color of the mask you have selected. Unlike HSL, changing the Hue slider will affect all of the masked area, not just a specific chosen color. Be very careful when using this, as it might have undesired side effects.

There is one key item that is very important to remember when restoring photos. It is to scan the photos in TIFF – .tif – (Tag Image File Format). If you scan in JPEG, you will lose a lot of color information that is preserved by TIFF. Not that TIFF can restore all the original color information, but because JPEG is a compressed image format, it discards anything it doesn’t need to generate the image the way you see it. Some of the information it discards will be crucial for better color editing.

Note: the photo of the girl used in this post was provided to me in jpeg, making it difficult to change the color enough to get the right skin color.

Note 2: I used the photo of the girl in front of the prop lollipop, even though it was in jpeg, for a couple or reasons. The first reason it is that she is my cousin and that photo is 43 years old. The second reason is that the difference in the color of the before and after is huge, with the after being almost what it should be (the jpg hasn’t made it easy to get the right skin color).

Note 3: The focus of the post was color correcting in the restoration process. As such, tiny faults in the photo that became visible once the color was corrected were not fixed as this is not the focus of the post.