Help! My Old Colour Photo has turned Pink - 5 Minute Digital Fix
Almost all of us will have seen this particular photographic
problem, namely, your old colour photographs appear to have
taken on an overall pink or blue tint.
This is primarily due to the chemicals within the various layers
of the photographic paper starting to breakdown, often due to
age, and the way that the photographs have been stored.
In many cases it is due to reactants in the environment
(remember acid rain?) causing a chemical reaction which
results in the fading of certain colour pigments in the photo.
Pink and blue colour shifts are commonplace.
Luckily, these colour shifts can be easily corrected, using your
favourite image manipulation software, in such a way as to be
able to produce an acceptable corrected image.
In the example image on our web-site the "before"
image of the house clearly shows a colour shift to pink.
Before we start using any of the image manipulation software
tools we first need to access the photograph in question and
determine the steps we need to take.
What do you know about the photograph in question?
Well ... it's a house with a front lawn of grass, a few bushes
and flowers, what appears to be a blue rubbish or compost bin,
and some (right now) pink edged clouds.
What else ... ?
If you know the actual house, as I do (it is my sister's), I can
tell you the window frames are painted white/cream and the front
lawn is always in good condition, lush and a deep green. The
bricks are a sandstone colour and because this house is in the
North of England it is fair to say that the colour of the sky
when the photo was taken would most probably have been a bit
grey/white and overcast.
The point of this exercise is to use "your mind's eye" to
try establish what the original photograph would have looked
like and the end result you want to match as closely as possible.
Basic Correction Method
The Basic Correction method described here can restore colour
faded or tinted photos and eliminate almost all of a
particular colour cast.
The simplicity of the Basic correction method is that it only
uses one command from Adobe Photoshop CS, namely the
Levels command.
The "After" image on our web-site does still have a
slight pink edge to the clouds, but the final image is more than
acceptable for printing.
The source of the your problematic image may have come from a
scanned negative, scanned print or digital camera image all
converted to an image format (most probably .JPG
pronounced