Restoring old photos using E9

Question

Is it posible to restore an old photo that has been partly sun bleeched using Elements 9?
Any tips would be very welcome.

Answer 1

This was good practice for me -- I never was any good at colouring black & white photos.
The original photo is a B&W that was hand-coloured.  You can tell by looking at the photo left arm and the photo left eye for the places where the colour bled into adjacent areas.  Also, there is red remaining in the cheeks, even though the rest of the face is bleached out.  This suggests that a retoucher used very finely powdered rouge to colour the cheeks, and those solid particles would not bleach as much as the dyes used for the other colours.
So, hatstead's idea of eliminating the colours and starting fresh with a B&W image is a good one.
The thing I wanted to avoid was having areas of solid featureless colour, so I decided that I'd hand-paint everything and thus get more realistically varied tones.  Turned out that the Color Replacement brush worked very well for that --
Duplicate background.
Convert to Black & White: "Portraits", "Contrast" +7.
Rectangular Marquee to select the faded area in the center of the image;
Transform Selection: "Skew" to align with the edges of the faded area.
Save Selection as "Faded Area".
Quick Selection tool:  select the clothes.
Save Selection as "Clothes".
Select...Load Selection:  "Faded Area" as "New Selection".
Select...Load Selection:  "Clothes" as "Subtract from selection"  This makes a selection of the faded area on the wall as well as the face and hair.
Select...Refine Edge:  Smooth:  0, Feather:  3.1px, Expand:  +3%.
Levels Adjustment Layer (masked to that selection):  0, 0.73, 255.
Select...Load Selection:  "Clothes" as "New Selection".
Select...Load Selection:  "Faded Area" as "Intersect with selection".  This makes a selection of the faded area of the clothes.
Select...Refine Edge:  Smooth:  0, Feather:  3.1px, Expand:  +3%.
Levels Adjustment Layer (masked to the selection):  0, 0.96, 255.
Highlight the 3 layers (B&W, both Levels layers) and use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E to merge them into a new layer.
Healing Brush tool:  "Normal" mode, Source:  "Sampled" to clean up lines, etc., left from the Levels adjustment.
Burn and Dodge tools targetting the Midtones at a strength of 4% to paint the folds and even out the tones in the photo left arm.
Burn and Dodge tools (same settings) to strengthen the appearance of the buttons and fabric edge of the center of the sweater.
Burn and Dodge and Spot Healing Brush to fix photo left eye.
Spot Healing Brush to fix blemish on upper lip (photo right), and on photo right upper arm.
Finished B&W image:
Color Replacement Brush, constantly varying the brightness and saturation of the colours to colour the image.
Quick Selection tool to select the child, then Inverse to select the background.
Save Selection as "Wall".
Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, masked to the "Wall" selection, set to "Colorize".  Hue:  199, Saturation:  5, Lightness:  -26.
Smudge Tool on the H/S mask to modify the edges of the hair.
Blur Tool, Strength:  56%, on the H/S mask to soften all edges:
Selection...Load Selection:  "Clothes".
H/S adjustment layer, masked to the "Clothes" selection, with a Saturation:  -35 to tone down the colours of the clothes and bring their colours more in line with the face.
Crop slightly to remove the white areas at the edges of the image.
The layers wound up like this:
And the final image:
Besides the practice with using the Color Replacement brush, I learned that using the Smudge and Blur tools on a layer mask is a great way to soften the edges of that mask.
Ken