Recovering Green Negatives

[jentenna]

So, my dad had some old negatives scanned... but they're 40 years old and came back with a heavy green cast.

Here's a couple before processing:





I'm trying to recover them without completely converting to black and white, and this is about as well as I could do in Photoshop. My basic workflow was: Color Balance -> Hue/Saturation -> Exposure adjustment (on vignette, primarily). In the first photo, I tweaked the vibrance. In the second, I needed noise reduction. The last step was healing some of the scraches/dust damage.

Here is the result:






Anyway, I'm wondering if it's possible to do better on these... the fix looks pretty undersaturated, since all the green is basically lost. And does anyone have suggestions on workflow for this type of work?

As a sidenote, the final edit reminds me of the instagram/hipstamatic iPhone edits. It's amusing to me that I'm trying to minimize that look in these photos, when I -- and most of my friends -- are adding it to their photos for Facebook. (Of course, it has its benefits there... it helps hide camera-phone shortcomings.)

[OsmosisStudios]

Try the levels: bring the green way down.

[jentenna]

Thanks for the reply. Just at a first attempt, it looks like this will make it possible to preserve the skin tones better.