Photo Restore & Color Balance

[ibclare]

Working with photographic restoration and color is not my strong suit. So I am trying to learn. I have an old photo that I want to restore (San Francisco 1971 ). I took it through Adobe Bridge first, then did curves and color balance in Photoshop. But I'm not sure 1) if it's a good balance, or 2) if it's much better than how it was right after Bridge.

I wanted to go for a rosier tint, but I'm having trouble doing that without darkening the img then seeing if I'm washing out the highlights. I know they are only recoverable to a certain extent, but of course I want that extent.

I've also had some weird issues. I threw one PS doc out because I couldn't get the layer adjustments right. I had a levels and a curves. When I turned both adj. layers off, the result was a greyed out, muddy image, nothing like what I started with. Why wouldn't the base layer remain original? Anyway, I just trashed that and started over.

Here are the images: 1 - as is; 2 - after corrections in Bridge; 3- after corrections in Photoshop.

[hawkeye]

Many ways to do it, Color balance, Selective Color, Hue Sat adjustment layers are a few of the alternatives.

[Hoogle]

Or go to Image> Adjustment > auto tone

[Stric9]

Making channel based selections can be helpful, also use Cntr+alt+~ to select just the highlights. I applied a photo filter at the end for a rosey color since you mentioned that.
Here is the psd so you can go through what I have done.sarah_padma_orig.psd If you like it that is.

[Stric9]

fixed the blown out spot on the jaw

[Steve]

Used Thresholds to find the lightest and darkest areas then Curves to balance Red Green and Blue to 10 in the shadows and 245 in the highlights.
No other changes.

[ibclare]

Hi guys. Thanks a lot for the input and the work you did. I think I'm having a monitor crisis. I probably need to calibrate as I am not really sure what I am looking at where these images are concerned. "Aaah'lllll be beck."

[stufflol]

my attempt

[ibclare]

Not bad Stuff. I like it overall especially the mom. Maybe a bit too sharp? But the cool temp works pretty well. Nice.
The original was pre-spotting. I used the PS version, which already had some "corrections," did an autotone (interesting to watch the expanded histograms), selected the most blown out highlights and did a slight exposure change, then a tad of sharpening. I still want a slightly rosier glow but for now I'm pretty satisfied. Tx all.
Here's my adjustment based on your comments:

[Paul]

All i did was copy the original, then multiplied that layer adjusted with curves slightly.
Then went into the exposure settings and played around with offset and gamma