Well, thanks to williarob I’ve awoken from my slumber. For a while now I’ve been trying to find a way to salvage the colors of what would appear to be unsalvageable prints. I’ve come up with a procedure, that actually combines both the color restoration, and color matching approaches. This does imply, that you need some kind of reference, but here goes.

I took some example frames that team -1 posted a while ago, to show that it is possible to retrieve a full range of colors from a severely faded film print. You will note, that there are some artifacts in the restored frames. These are due to compression, and lack of color depth (8 bit). Here are two frames from the -1 LPP, that will serve as references:

Here are the same frames, but for a print that has almost gone monochrome:

Here are the results after color balancing, and subsequent matching to the references: