Hi everyone, new member here. Do have a question

[LindaPradetto]

Thank you for letting me join your group. I'm glad I found you. I am relatively proficient in PhotoShop. Although most of the work I do is on my husbands sports photography, I've done some photo restoration. Though not a lot and not for awhile.
I have a black and white photo of my husband and his father from when Ron was a child. The image is fine for the most part and won't be a problem to fix up. I want to clean it up, print it to watercolor paper and use soft pastels to color it in. The problem I'm having is that the right (or left facing) eye of my husband is pretty degraded. It is very much in shadow and appears to have blisters and scratches on it so that the eye is hardly showing through all of the noise. I've uploaded two images of his head, the raw scan and one with the levels adjusted.
Anyone have any ideas on how to clean this up? I think I could get a lot of it with the healing brush and the clone stamp, but am thinking this may be very time consuming. I was wondering if there was maybe a trick out there that would take care of most of it. I've got the Katrin Eismann Photoshop Restoration & Retouching book, but am not seeing this exact problem in it.
I'd really appreciate any help I could get, thanks all.
Linda

[0lBaldy]

Hi Linda, Welcome to RetouchPRO glad to see you here. Hope you make many new friends!

I just did some basic work on your Crop:
Shadow/highlight
Neat Image noise reduction
Then on a copied layer.. Polaroid Scratch and Dust remover light ..merged down.. copied layer.. then dark... merged down (Both with hide all mask)
copied good eye.. flipped and just used the round part by masking everything else out

Good Luck with your restore! Lots of grain there!
Looking forward to seeing the post of your results after completing this picture!

[TommyO]

Linda,
Welcome to RP !

I think I would go with OlBaldy's copy>flip of the other eye. But, I would use even more of the surrounding area. Luckily, the shot is straight on, making it much more acceptable to do so.

[Kraellin]

welcome to RP, linda.

the trick here is to bring out more of the image to find where it needs correction. i started with a brightness/contrast adjustment layer, followed by a levels adjustment layer. both of these were used to get a brighter image and a bit more contrast. this showed me that the area over the one eye was indeed underexposed and therefore missing some of the true data.

i took that info and used clone to put back some better data where it was too black. along with that, i did some airbrushing of the whites of the eyes.

i then copy merged and pasted to new layer. this gave me a composite of all the work done so far all on one layer. to that, i did digital camera noise removal, fairly strong. i also did a very light fade correction. this gave some good contrast but made things a bit too dark so i used another brightness/contrast adj layer.

to finish, i did some more clone on various small items that needed fixing throughout the image. and that was it.

[Nan]

Hi, the only thing that worked for me was cloning around the eye until it looked like the other one, adding some dodge and burn where needed. I did a couple of levels layers to brighten it up, a some noise removal, and high pass sharpen. I'm sure you could copy and paste, then mirror the good eye also.
Nan

[learninlady]

high pass edge effect (114.00 radius, desaturate),after cleaning it up with noise removal/ contast curves

[Southbay]

Quick stab at it.

[beefy24]

HI
I did some noise reduction,fliped the other eye and did some cloning