Hi guys, im a newbie but i have to say that i am so glad that i have come across the site. It is a credit to you all. Basically im a keen amature photographer who has only recently start converting across to digital, somewhat reluctantly... but thats another story ... anyway i've been using cs2 for a few months kow to clean up my scanned prints and doing so happily. Basic enough usadge mind, namely clone stamp tool and affecting levels etc... I came across a photo of my mams 21st birthday from over 40 yrs ago and it is damaged but my level of cloning and messing with the levels is doing no good. I am reaching out to you guys with the better knowledge in the hope that you can give me a bit of a hand and advice on how to get it back to how it should look...

thanks in advance for any help

hi guys, ive attached a copy of my efforts so far, using the clone and levels tools... once again any help would be great
Thanks

Hi Positivenote, welcome!
I took a run at this. I made two copies and exposed one for the face that is blown out. Merged the two photos and then masked in the new exposed part. Despeckeled, removed noise, unsharp mask. Then I made a selection of the right side of the mans face, flipped it horizontally and postioned it over the left side to replace it. Used the healing brush to dab here and there on the sweater to take out the line that was left.
Hope that makes sence. I'm not sure I explained it well.

I tried to even up the tone in the damaged area with a duplicate layer set to 'multiply' blending mode and masked to single out the damage and preserve the rest -created a duplicate of this 'multiply' layer (so I could use my mask again) changed the blending mode to 'linear burn' and dropped the opacity to 50% for to coax some more detail out of the damaged area, painting on the layer mask (example screenshot 2) to best blend in my adjustments with the rest of the image. I had to stop there...got to get the dinner on :)

Thanks a million guys. I have been doing some of the tutorials from 'tutorial bucket' which have also been great help

did some masking, selecting, airbrush, clone, push brightness/contrast, curves, clarify, shadows/midtones/highlights and probably something else.

Had a quick go with your picture.

This is as good as I could get it in the time available to me.

Evened out the lighting as much as possible (graining prevents to much improvement) by using levels with a graduated mask.

Selected the blown area and adjusted levels and curves for best match.

Cloned out any joins.

Little bit of Dodge and Burn to blend things in a touch.

once again guys, thanks for your efforts. im only really starting out in this end of photography and alot of your work is very inspiring. if i want to keep improving where do you recomend to go other than tutorial bucket to get some decnt tutorials?
thanks again

If you want a good book on retouching techniques, I highly recommend "Photoshop Restoration & Retouching" by Katrin Eismann, it really is excellent.

Look through the tutorial section on this site as well, there's a whole mass of stuff that's been written by members here.