Scanned old photos have blotchy black areas

Similar issue here. The images are high resolution scan, *.TIFF, and 30-80 MB each. On several scans, the black ink caused a reflection. Is there a way to autocorrect?

Just for reference, these are some things that might have caused those shadows to get blotchy:

A print has less color information than its original negative/slide, which can really limit how far you can go with edits. If the film was underexposed, the shadows start out even worse. And when stored digitally, shadows contain less information than highlights.

When the image was corrected, the already limited color information in the shadows may have been stretched too far, causing the shadows to fall apart.

If the scan was saved in JPEG format before editing, the lossy compression might have broken up the shadow information even more.

For photo prints made by a drugstore or Polaroid camera (in other words, not the highest quality), this type of problem is often difficult to avoid. There might not have been much you could do about this when scanning, if the print had such a strong color cast. What a professional scanner operator would do differently is scan from the original film (if available), at a higher bit depth (such as 16 bits per channel) to preserve more of the available tonal resolution, and save in a lossless format such as TIFF or Photoshop (PSD) for the editing stage. However, the cost of the higher bit depth and lossless format is a much larger file size per image, which is a problem when scanning hundreds of family photos. (I dealt with that problem by budgeting both for very high capacity storage for scans, and for enough backup storage to keep all that safe.)

Scanning at a higher spatial resolution (for example, at 600 ppi vs 300 ppi) might not help, if this problem is more about tonal resolution per channel. This is why some of the best suggestions in this thread have to do with trying to reconstruct that weak blue channel using information from other color channels.

Hi @LucyLu62 Mary - are the original photos digital prints, in other words is the damage you are seeing in the original print or after you scan?

If its after you scan try changing your settings for your Epson scanner to 600 ppi and if you are using FastFoto make sure the application is not enhancing the image.

It looks to me like the damage is done earlier. At some point this has been processed at low bit depth and low resolution, and apparently some channel clipping. In other words, it's been very carelessly treated.

This is how the blue channel looks. Not pretty. The interesting thing is that the blocks you see here is not the scanner resolution. The scanner pixels are much smaller scale and become visible if you zoom further in, but this appears to be in the image:

In other words, we're talking manual repair and rebuilding.

As a quick fix, try a hue/saturation adjustment layer set to 0 saturation, and then use Blend If to restrict the effect to the shadow areas.

You can try adjusting with Levele & Curves (Image>Adjustments>Levels Curves), but often with this situation the pixels just aren't there. Depending on the sie of the affected area, I've sometimes been able to overcome this using the Content Aware fill. There's also the Clone Stamp Tool, but you have to be careful to vary the size to avoid having it look like a pattern.