What is the best way to deal with the damage on the trousers on bottom right of this image? Any other tips would be welcome.

I burned the pants, seemed to work ok.

Other stuff I did:

1. Cloned out the dots and other scanned imperfections(still more to be done).

2. Blurred the background.

3. Added some color.

4. Added a border.

5. Increased exposure.

6. Darkened the blacks.

7. Added some fill light.

8. Some vignette.

9. Sharpened.

10. Noise reduction.

None of these were really massive changes, nor very necessary. It's best you just play with it until you get a look that you like. It's a nice old photo btw.

Your photo... (http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w57/corndography/copy.jpg)

For his pants I did a combination of burning and a curves adjustment layer with the layer mask revealing only the light spot. I then did some dust removal, sharpening, cropping, cloning out distracting elements, and an overall curves adjustment layer.
I hope this helps you!

This is my try. However, I think it is a little too contrasty.

-curves
-history brush
-slight sharpen
-healing brush

dc

Still it needs to be cleaned up, but I have been trying to eliminate the light spot on the right hand side.
A lot of masking & blending + some byro’s sharpening.

Thanks all..

I gave this a try... patch tool to fix the dots and scanning imperfections
to fix the light spot on the pant at the bottom right, i duped the layer inverted it
used the dodge tool to even out the color in the inverted layer then inverted again came up with this

Very good thanks

i'm moving this to the restoration forum.