Scrapping 70's pictures

[elizabethlmccoy]

I'm looking for some pages that have been done using scanned pictures from the 70s.

Thanks for your help

[Meg]

Here's two I've done with a couple of my photos:

My 1975 (http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=48777&cat=500&page=2)

Special Times with Grandma (http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=32992&nocache=1)

I also have lots of 70's photos that I've scanned but not yet scrapped. What are you looking for?

[Karen Bowers]

http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=55355&cat=500&page=1 is from the 70's.

[elizabethlmccoy]

anyone else??? are we all just scrapping our newer pictures and our really old pictures.

I'm having a hard time with these 70's pictures because the coloring is so off....you know how everything is organgy and brownish....and the print quality is terrible!!

Do you suggestion recoloring to b&W

[MaureenH]

I have a few layouts from the late 1960s that are very similar to the 1970s. I usually use the auto color feature in Photoshop to get rid of the red cast and then either levels or curves to correct the fading. If the auto color doesn't work, I'll go to color balance and reduce the red or magenta.

http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=35604&cat=500&page=2

http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=36908&cat=500&page=2

http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=34982&cat=500&page=2

http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=34149&cat=500&page=2

[Amanda]

You can easily fix the coloring - but use the color wheel to help balance the orangy colors :)

[Janet]

Adjusting color manually gets easier the more you do it. When I was first starting at it, I kept notes out for the "opposite" color in photos:

Cyan - Red
Magenta - Green
Yellow - Blue

To adjust the 70's yellowish orange, usually it is reduce red and add blue...but not always. Sometimes you need to add green instead of cyan. If there's something in the photo that should be white, one trick is to move sliders until you see the color show of that slider (say, cyan as you reduce red). Then back it off a bit, until you no longer see the color. Then move to the next one. If you're not sure what color is in the extreme, increase the saturation all the way and it'll be more obvious.

And with some of the 70's photos, increasing the overall saturation can also help.

[premier]

I have many photos that the colors have turned. Here is an example of a bad photo with turned colors that I restored quickly in order to post here. Photo is bad to begin with but it illustrates how colors can be restored.

http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=56489&cat=506&page=1

[Biffylady]

Oh, this thread is exactly what I need!! DH and I just visited my parents and I spent just about the entire time scanning photos from my mom's albums. I got through about five albums, but still have atleast 15 more to do!! Looks like I'll be busy when we go down for Christmas!!

Thank you for the wonderful ideas!

[Rosemary]

I have had the same problems, Liz. My grandfather has an album of photos that need ocrrecting. Janet's advice has been helpful - I need to play around with it more.

Another technique that I've used is Scott Kelby's Color correction technique from Photoshop for Digital Photographers. He includes it for correcting color casts, but I've found it works pretty well with the 70's photos too (Isuppose it's a color cast of a more severe kind!). If you don't have the book I'd be happy to share the technique with you.

These layouts of the Bennelong both had an orange cast, the bottom one on both pages had it particularly bad.

Bennelong - Title (http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=54455&cat=500&page=1)
Bennelong - 1973 (http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=54454&cat=500&page=1)

[Karooch]

The info in this thread is great. I have recently come across a number of 70s (and earlier) photos that have not aged well and I am trying to recover them for the future. Please check out my gallery for a photo of my parents at a wedding anniversary celebration in the early 70s. I had to rescue the deteriorating photo for this one.

[Waterqueen]

I had a similar problem with my mom's wedding pictures. Snapshots of the people who came and the events leading up to it were starting to fade and lose details. I played with it for hours on PSP trying to get it right and recover her memories. I finally gave in and took it to a professional photo restorer. He was able to recover it nicely, but some of the details are still fuzzy...kinda like mom's memory. :)

[Karooch]

Rosemary I've just checked out your Bennelong pist and they look great. If you could share the technique with me it would be very much appreciated. Thanks a lot for the offer.

[Rosemary]

Heya Karooch,

It's pretty easy, thanks to Scott Kelby for his great technique.

This helps you identify the darkest and brightest points in your photo so you can tell the curves what black looks like and what white looks like. It corrects the colors from that.

This is for Photoshop CS.

1. Open up the photo you want to adjust.
2. At the bottom of your layers pallete, click on the circle that's half black and white - 'create a new fill or adjustment layer'.
3. From the pop up menu choose 'threshold'.
4. Your photo will get a new layer and go black/white and a threshold popup box will show. Take the white slider and drag it to the left until you just run out of black in your picture. Drag it just back to the right until you get one or a few small points of black.
5. Click 'ok'.
6. Click and hold on the Eyedropper tool until you get the flyout menu and choose the color sampler tool.
7. put the sampler tool over one of the black spots on your photo and click. A little target with a '1' beside it will appear. If you're a little bit off, click and drag the target to reposition it.
8. Go back to the threshold layer and double click to open the threshold popup again.
9. This time drag the slider to the right until the photo is nearly all black, leaving one or a few spots of white.
10. Click 'ok' again.
11. Use the color sampler tool again and mark a second spot. Another target with a '2' will appear.
12. Hide or discard the threshold layer, you're done with it.
13. Ctrl-M to open up the curves tool.
14. it looks intimidating, but it's not. Go to the eyedroppers under the options buttons on click on the black eye dropper (the one that is half filled with black).
15. Find that target with the '1' beside on it and click on it with the black eyedropper. This tells curves that that is what 'black' should be in your photo.
16. Now click on the white eyedropper and do the same with the target labelled '2'.
17. In most cases your color will be close, but might need a light tweak. Select the middle dropper and look in your photo for a mid-grey. click where you think it is. I click and ctrl-z until I get the right shade, you can tell by looking at your photo. In his CS2 book Scott has a technique for finding the mid-grey, I haven't tried it yet, but knowing Scott's books, it probably rocks.
18. One last thing. The colors in the photo are probably close, but I usually like to give my midtones a tweak. On the curve you've created (that's that diagonal line on the left side of the Curves tool) click and drag the center of the line a little to the bottom right or the top left until the photo looks just right. Sometimes you won't even need this.
19. When you're happy, click ok on Curves.
20. To get rid of the targets and numbers, make sure the color sampler tool is selected, go up to the toolbar and click on 'clear'. The targets will disappear.

That should be it! Any questions, let me know.

[Starling]

Heya Karooch,

It's pretty easy, thanks to Scott Kelby for his great technique.

This helps you identify the darkest and brightest points in your photo so you can tell the curves what black looks like and what white looks like. It corrects the colors from that.

This is for Photoshop CS.

1. Open up the photo you want to adjust.
[snip]
That should be it! Any questions, let me know.

Wow. I have the book for PS 7. That technique is not there in that book. He really does rewrite for every new Photoshop version.

[shazzt]

Here is one I did:
Road Trip (http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=29660&cat=500&page=7)

[Rosemary]

Yes, he does improve every edition. There are things in his CS2 book that I can do in CS, just that he didn't know about them when he wrote the CS book. I think people are always showing him things and giving him new ideas so he keeps improving the books!

[Karooch]

Thanks for sending me the instructions Rosemary. I use PSE 2 and I think some of the features of CS are not available in this version. But some of them may just be located in a different place. So I'll be hanging on to your instruction sheet and continue trying to make it work for PSE 2.

[elizabethlmccoy]

okay i finally got my new scanner (the 3rd one worked!!) and i was able to scan in some of those 70's pictures I'd love it if you took a looK:
http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=61864&cat=500&ppuser=55

[Janet]

HOORAY!!! So glad to hear the third time WAS the charm! :)