Too Much to handle?

[Orange]

Hey all.
As most people, I'm a photoshop newb who wants to do some work on a (probably very) damaged photograph for a friend of mine.

I've scanned it with my Canoscan Lide30 scanner (not sure if the hardware matters much) at 300dpi.

Thing is with this photograph, I'm looking to fix the tear that's by the man's head, and to either fix all those wrinkles, or taking away the background overall. Then again, this will be my first time at trying this, so any advice on tackling this would be greatly appreciated. I just hope that it won't be too much to handle or that the extent of the damage is too great for repair.

[Wolfman]

I cleaned up the upper half of your image and cropped it. You can clean up the lower half with careful clone stamping on layers to be safe.

It was mainly cloning and shadow/highlight & contrast adjustment.
You can hack away at the rest and if you are careful, you can revive your
photo.

Good Luck

[Orange]

Hey Wolfman, thanks a lot for the reply.
Did you just take the whole background away or did you take the wrinkles out? If it's the latter, how did you do it?

[Wolfman]

I used the clone stamp and cloned a smooth area into the whole background.
It's that simple. Clone a small area that isn't bad into a bad area and when you have built up a larger smooth area move to that area as a larger source to clone from and repair the rest of the bad area.

[Orange]

Oh okay, I'm going to give that a go.
Thanks for your advice Wolfman!