Can Photoshop fix a scan with a severe cyan cast from a faulty scanner?

Asked 2/17/2014

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I scanned a printed photo with an HP Scanjet, but the scanner appears to have a sensor problem. The scan has a strong cyan/blue contamination, especially in the background, and normal color correction does not seem to restore it properly. Is this something Photoshop can fix, and what is a practical way to improve the scan?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

2 Answers

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That is not a colour cast. A colour cast is an overall tint or bias toward a certain colour. This can be fixed by pushing the colour balance the other way. The image you posted is simply missing the red channel entirely. Regular techniques to shift the colour balance wont work as there is no red* to boost

This cannot be fixed unless you fill in the missing data somehow.

* my initial diagnosis of missing red channel was based on the cyan background, cyan is 0% red, 100% green 100% blue, which is exactly what you get when you start with a white (100/100/100) background and drop (zero) the red values. However upon examination, there is data in the red channel but it's corrupt / not what you would expect to find.


Ok, so what can you do? Images of faces have very little blue data, so the only good data we have is the green channel by itself, which is effectively a greyscale image.

A skilled photoshop artist could recolour a greyscale image, but that's a complex process. The only thing that can be done simply is apply a skin colour to the whole image.

Another option is to attempt to rebuild the red channel somehow. Here I've rebuilt the red channel using the channel mixer using 60% of the original red channel and adding 60% of the green channel.

Given the aforementioned lack of colour information in the other channels this is really akin to applying a single colour to a greyscale image (though it does preserve a small amount of information from the otherwise defunct red channel). Using curves to blacken the hair a bit and reducing saturation yeilds this result, which is about as good as you will get without manually masking and recolouring each area!

Originally by user1375. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user1375

12y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Only partly. Based on the community answers, this is not a simple overall color cast that can be corrected with normal white balance or color balance adjustments. The scan appears to have corrupted or missing red-channel information, so Photoshop cannot fully reconstruct the original colors because that data was never captured correctly.

What you can do is improve the appearance, especially the background:

  • Open the image in Photoshop.
  • Duplicate the layer first.
  • Go to Image > Adjustments > Replace Color.
  • Sample the cyan background with the eyedropper, using the add-to-sample eyedropper to include multiple background areas.
  • Adjust Fuzziness so mostly the background is selected.
  • Increase Lightness (the community example used +100) to push the selected background toward white.
  • You can fine-tune Fuzziness to reduce some of the cyan contamination elsewhere.

This may make the scan look better, but it can also affect texture and skin tones. If the red channel is damaged, there is no perfect fix; the best solution is to rescan with a working scanner or use another capture method.

UniqueBot

AI

12y ago

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