Hello to all you talented and amazing photo retouch artists! :)

I have an image that I would like some assistance with restoring.

You can follow this URL link to the picture as it was too large to post here in the forum: http://www.davidshouse.cjb.net/image.html

This is the only picture of a friend's family's ancestors (as you can tell by looking at this image--it is very, very old). I cannot figure out for the life of me how to remove the patterns of dark and light horizontal areas across the photo. I can do the cloning and healing, but those repeating patterns are a dilemma! Also, what would you suggest to remove the myriad of spots and blotches without spending days using the clone/healing brush?

I sure would like to be able to fix this up for my friend, but I don't know to what degree this is fixable, so I am presenting it to you all, who are so much more experienced and knowledgeable in doing this kind of work as I am still a student of photo restoration.

Thank you so much in advance! :cool:

Blessings to all,
Sweet-P

I got to this point and leave it to you to clean up from here...

1. Duplicate the background layer
2. In Channels, duplicated the Red channel and ran Levels with outputs of 201, 0.62, 242. It looks wierd, but bear with me. Invert this copy and load the mask and apply it to the background copy.
3. Set the copy and it's mask to blend mode of multiply.
4 Now, keep making duplicates of this layer until you have effectivally wiped out most of the black bars. It took me 11 or twelve copies.
5 Merge all the masked layers and go from there

I don't think the clothes features are important in shots like these. Heck, most all clothing back in this era were black or dark anyway.

Here's the original