I've been restoring my dads photo from when he graduated from Paris Island.
The face, whilst full of scratches, creases and other nasty things cleaned up fairly well. His hat was trickier. I had to tweak and tamper for something I'm fairly happy with. But his uniform. Lord almighty is it a mess. It's been etched by the oil of thumb prints I dunno how old and they've left green all over. Wouldn't be so bad except this stuff doesn't clean up half as nicely as scratches due to their compact shape. It ends up leaving great globs of tacky green on the uniform which is noticable even at a distance.
Worse still I can't risk trying to rescan the photo as not only is it no bigger than a buisness card. It's on it's last leg. Cleaning it would turn the thing to powder I'm certain.
And so, I come to you on creaky knees. How can I fix this mess?
And honestly. not just the Uniform. All of it, this is meant to be hung on a wall next to my brothers in both my grandmothers in the states as well as here so my jury rigging won't cut it.

Ok, most important question- did you save a copy of the original scan, sans clean up attempts? If so, send that to me at april@aprildwiggins.com

Now, I'm about to recommend something here that I normally wouldn't when dealing with old originals, but I think preserving the "structural integrity" of this photo is going to outweigh whether or not you're keeping it in an "archival" condition. You need to get that thing mounted to a rigid backing, so that it won't crumble all to pieces. I don't know what you have available to you, but you need to get your hands on some 100% cotton rag matboard, and some acid free double sided tape- the glues will be too wet to risk putting on the back of this thing, and heat dry-mounting is out of the question. So, get a card of archival quality matboard, about an 8x10. Lay the photo in the center, and lightly trace around the edges so that you have a box the size of this photo drawn on the backing board. Fill the inside entirely with the acid free double sided tape- you want the surface area of the box totally covered. Lay the photo back into the box, and lightly press it down. Good idea is to cover it with a protective sheet and then use a brayer to apply uniform pressure, so that the entire back sticks to the double sided tape.

If you do this, you should be able to scan it again if necessary, without having to worry about chunks falling off it, or anything. Otherwise, keep it in a poly bag of some sort (comic book bags work great for this) and keep it sealed. Keep the photo in the dark, too. This should preserve the photo for a while longer, and allow you to make as high res of a scan as possible. You are right in that you don't want to keep scanning the thing, but it sounds like it may be necessary at least one more time.

At any rate, get that file to me when you get it. I'll see what I can do.

Oh, trust me Fury we're taking as much care of this photo as able. Solid frame, the works. Because, along with the retoutched photo, we have to send it back when done.

As for the orriginal. Well, I had one but I started this awhile ago and forgot to take all the neccesary precautions with the stock image and due to fat fingering it saved over it. I don't have access to the downstairs computer at the moment (it has the scanner) but as soon as I do I'll get it scaned at a high resolution.
Thankyou for offering.

Ok, here is a small version of what I was able to do. I've got it saved in a pretty monstrous .psd file, just let me know what size and format you want me to send it to. I recommend keeping it pretty large, simply because that gives you a lot more printing options- provided you and your family like what I was able to do.

Wow! Where's that jaw drop smiley when you need it? Great job Fury

I'm not worthy! *bows down*
How the heck did you fix it up so well?
That is some truely impressive work on the Uniform (though I may need to slap on the red trim and buttons when I get it as this second scan seems to have completely lost the detail on his right pocket and the trim on my brothers that I used as reference is quite vivid.
But once again. Astounding work on the picture all round.
Also I think Yahoo can accept over 20MB inbound, it's just limited to 10 going out.
Of course, it depends just how monsterous you're talking about.

My folks just saw the preview over skype and were flabergasted. They said to pass on much thanks and kudos. Just thought you might like to hear.

Fury=AWESOME ART GODDESS.

And master archival framer..

Hell, I can't take the credit due Adobe. There are some pretty impressive tools in Photoshop when it comes to retouching and repairing photos. The healing brush is nothing short of amazing. There is still some areas of green in the uniform, but as I tinkered I decided that it was better to leave that alone and let the photo look more "natural" than to have an obvious retouching. Which, btw, is something I recommend with the trim and buttons. Yes, you have a loss of detail, but if you try to apply something over it, I'm afraid it may end up looking obviously applied. 'Course, so long as you hang on to your original file, you can play with it as much as you like. I will probably pull this up a couple of more times to try and make minor adjustments to the saturation and contrast levels. If I come up with something I'm happier with than this, I'll send it on.

Just curious- do you have any idea about the average size you think you guys may want to print this out as? If I can save it to the largest size you're likely to print, it will be easy to make smaller prints- it doesn't work so well going the other direction.

EDIT: Yup, I figured if I came back to it and monkeyed with the levels, saturation and such I'd find a balance that I liked. This one has a little more true-to-life colors, I'm betting.

Not sure if this'll help as reference (due to the noise) but here it is anywho.
My brother Dan.
I used this one for things like the trim and buttons. Not so much cut and paste on the trim for obvious reasons but it was handy as color reference. Despite my feelings about losing details in the uniform as you can see your uniforms Navy color is almost spot on with this one. Kinda wish they wore a dark grey or something so that the details held up in photos.

Holy....