Can someone please help with picture. I would like help with the darker area towards the bottom of the photo. If you can help would you also post steps of what you did so I can try it and learn from it please. Thanks Neb

This is the only file size I have hope you can work with it.

Are you wondering about the slight horizontal banding or the tan-colored blotches?

If the banding, then smooth out the sharp parts of the bands--in Paintshop Pro, the scratch remover does this pretty well. Otherwise, the healing brush in Photoshop might do this (I'm not totally sure.) Then create a burn layer and a dodge layer. Paint a VERY faint black brush on the burn layer to darken the light places and a VERY faint white brush on the dodge layer to lighten the dark areas.

If the blotches, then that's looks like a job for the clone brush.

Is that enough detail?

Bart

Hi Neb,
I started with the two bands at the bottom which were darker than the top section. To match up the lightness I took the image into LAB color because the numbers make more sense. You can do the same thing in RGB color or grayscale. Starting with the bottom one, and using the rectangular marquee tool, drew a selection around that large area just overlapping it by about 1/8 of an inch. Your selection should be feathered by about 3 or 4 pixels. I then placed to eyedropper targets, (see the attachemnt screenshot 1), one on the man's trouser leg in the lighter area, and the 2nd one near the top of the dark area we are working on. Call up the Curves control window (Crtl M). Check your Info Palette and see the lightness value of those two targets. The top eyedropper has a L value of ~76, the other in the dark area has a value of ~64. The objective will be two raise the value of the lower one. To do this hold the Ctrl key down and click on the darker target. This will place a black dot on the curve. Now click that dot on the curve to make it editable. In the output box (the bottom one) change the value to match the L value of the brighter target. You will see the curve bow slightly upward. Click OK.

Repeat the process for the smaller band just above the dark band. Same procedure to make a feather selection, apply the curve and match the lightness values. The selection and curve is shown in screenshot 2.

When you are done, you may have two lines where there was overlap. These should be fairly thin and you can zap them away by running the Clone Stamp across them.

Next I fixed the right side torn area by simply patching some of the good area on top of it. You can use the Patch tool or just make a feathered seelection, copy to its own layer, reposition over the damaged area, and merge down.

Then Clone Stamp is the fastest way to get rid of the bright stains. You can find a new shoe from some other photo and patch it over the man's torn one.

A small amount of unsharp mask will give the image a little more pop.
Finally, the image is almost B&W but has a slight green tint. This is a little cold for a baby photo. So when you are all done I would recommend Image>Mode Duotone and give the image a Sepia or other warmer tone.
Good luck with your restoration

Regards, Murray