How to salvage pics taken with a camera with a faulty CCD sensor?

[foxor]

The following photos were taken on a recent trip to Central America. I took two cameras on the trip (luckily!), one of them being my previously perfectly functional old Canon S400 Digital Elph...which I bought an underwater case for. Since the camera started taking bad pictures even before I took it underwater, and since the case worked absolutely perfectly, I can only assume that it was the humidity of the rainforest that caused the problems related to a faulty CCD image sensor to suddenly manifest. The good news? Canon has committed to replacing these sensors free of charge in affected cameras, regardless of warrantee status (my camera must be at least five or six years old and they told me to send it to them, no problem). The bad news? I have all kinds of pictures from an amazing trip, which I wouldn't have gotten without the underwater case for my camera, which are all distorted and have terrible colouring. Below are two examples I thought might be salvageable. Any ideas how I might be able to save these pics with a bit (or a lot?) of post processing, using photoshop?




Fortunately the problem is a little intermittent, and not every single one of my pictures taken with that camera were affected....just most of them

[Sterling]

I'm no PS expert, but I'd say those would be reasonably easy selections using the color range tool. For the second pic you could exchange the pink for a new sky fairly easily. The nice thing about selecting using color range is that it would capture the reflection on the water too. It looks like the malfunction has substituted pink for areas that would normally be blown out white. If you replace the sky use one that is somewhat cloudy as it is clear from the foliage that it was not sunny at that spot. I bet if you replaced the pink with white in every photo, they would look just as they would've with a working sensor.

For the underwater shot, I'd be tempted be crop it to a portrait orientation of the right side to get rid of a big chunk of pink on the bottom left. Then use a similar technique to replace the remaining pink. Sorry, I can't be more specific, but one of the gurus will surely be along to help.

[OsmosisStudios]

The second you should be able to fix fairly easily. Crop the top band out and use the colour balance tool to balance things back away from the magenta.

The first might be tougher. Not only does it have the banding and colour shift but its rather overexposed. You could try the same technique, but it still wont be "saved"

[sk66]

Image>adjustments>hue/saturation: change selection from "master" to red or whatever works best..use dropper to select the pink color and then adjust hue/saturation....can also be adjusted with levels similarly.

[edbayani]

you'd be able to salvage it with photoshop using clone tool, hue and desaturation, and some burn tool.
i hope you don't mind the sample i attached.

[sk66]

Originally Posted by edbayani

you'd be able to salvage it with photoshop using clone tool, hue and desaturation, and some burn tool.
i hope you don't mind the sample i attached.

Really nice job on that second one....

[foxor]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, and edbayani, your posted examples look great! Thanks for that!! I'll obviously have to sort through and only bother with the very best of the best, but still...it seems i will be able to make 'decent' pictures out of totally wacky looking ones.