This is a carte de visite from about 1870. I've just scanned it and I'm planning a strategy.

I can't see doing a laborious restore of the background when a well-done gradient would look about the same. That is the problem, the "well done" part. I'm now afraid to tackle it because I don't feel very confident. I tried roughly duplicate the look and I think it will need either two radial gradients or two cutout kind of things with a Gaussian blur? I'd appreciate any suggestions from those who know what they're doing :)

Thanks,
MJ

Hi Charlene,

Had a quick play with your picture.

Extracted figure.

Created a Radial Gradient with tones sampled from original BG (Think I should have made the gradient a touch more severe). Applied noise to it to simulate original, (blurred noise with GB set to about 0.5).

Flattened image and applied Neat Image to reduce noise across picture.

Bit of cloning to remove a few minor blemishes.