30-something year old photo with rust spots

[keepemcomin]

I was given this picture by a friend who would like me to touch it up for her. I haven't been using Photoshop regularly and I'm out of practice, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. I did a little bit with the clone stamp tool but if there's a faster way I want to know about it before I put a lot of work into cloning.

If you look closely you can see that the entire photograph has a slight canvas-y texture which is making it more difficult for me to clone seamlessly. Any tips?

[mistermonday]

Run a mild nosie filter like Imagenomic on it to smooth out some of the fine noise. Duplicate the BG, then do Image>Apply Image and se;ect the red channel, 100% opacity, normal blend mode, resulting in a grayscale layer. Change the blend mode of this layer to Luminosity. Now add a new blank layer on top and set the blend mode to color. Select the paint brus and alt+click to sample a good color and paint over the stains. You should be able to paint most of them and clone a smaller number. At the end you will probably need to do a curves adjustment(s) to color correct the image.
Good luck with the restoration.
Regards, Murray

[unimatrix001]

I did a quick fix still needs more work but most of the spots are gone. I checked the channels found the blue channel was damaged the most. I selected the green channel pasted it over the blue channel and used a levels adjustment to reset the blue channel to the correct colors, then a levels adjustment layer to adjust all the colors. There is still abit to much green in it but that can be adjusted out with a curves adjustment layer.

[chillin]

The colors you could fix with a few HSL layers using very narrow color ranges,
and the noise reduction I would do at the end of a work-flow.
Here you can see some steps.

[tom60634]

Had to give it a try

[TommyO]

Chillin,
Your colors are spot on, as usual.

Keepemcomin,
Maybe the issue is not the texture, but trying to correct too much with the clone stamp. Examine one of the others' results and see if you could take it from there fairly easily. If so, then refocus on doing the color correction first. Then repair as needed.

I generally do a mix. I like to color correct first, re-examine the image, use a technique similar to Murray (by either painting in color blend mode, or cloning in color blend mode) to repair stained areas.... then do a little noise/dust removal... finishing with one final color correction.

[Cupcake]

Here is my try.

Large file if needed.

[lynn55]

I learned new tutorial from Retouchpro members.

I cropped photo, adjust color level, set multiply , use burn tool for darken background.

[TommyO]

Lynn55,
I like your crop and approach to the image.

The colors are starting to get a bit off though. The most noticeable is the water glasses. They are beginning to look like they are holding coca-cola. While I like the fact that darkening the background can eliminate some distractions, there is really no need to darken the foreground. There was very adequate and accurate detail in the foreground beforehand. (Chillin's image is a good one to go by.) You could use a mask within your multiply and burn layers to prevent the carryover.

[Kraellin]

very nice, chillin!

[chillin]

Thanks Kraellin & TommyO, I hope that the quick time "frame slider" would help someone.