Remove Gray Speckles from Old Photo

[bbq_bob]

I am trying to restore this photo for myself and other family members. It looks like it has a speckled fog, or gray water marks over much of the photo. Look at the bottom third of the photo to see what I mean. Other than using the healing tool on each spot, is there a photoshop trick to remove these marks. I tried using the "replace color" tool, but it did not work exactly how I wanted. Any help would be appreciated. I would prefer instructions as to what to do so that I can learn from it.

Thanks.

 

[Pipsmom]

And I thought I had been doing some bad ones to restore...
Watching to see what the pro's recommend but can't help but have a play with it tomoarrow to see what can be achieved.

 

[Pipsmom]

Quick edit didn't spend a whole lot of careful time on it since you want to do it yourself....Had a practice on it but being a newby myself I couldn't save the bottom, cropped, cloned altered the saveable, blurred the back ground heavily etc...just had a play with it.
Hope it doesn't show too dark here as the forum usually applys that.
Anyway, my try




Version 2

 

[thebestcpu]

I would start by looking at the color channels. The red channel looks like it has the least damage.
Copy that Red channel to its own Layer and then add another Layer on top with the blend mode set to Color. Add a brown color sampled from his suit.
The above would be a good starting point and then adjusting tone to have a crisper image.

Hope that gives you a start.

PS - here is a split image of what the above can give you

 

[bbq_bob]

Thanks for the guidance. I hadn't thought of using one color channel. It might have been the easier route to go than what I did. I may try to do it again using that approach.

I kept searching for tips and found this page:
http://photo-repair.com/DRBookPromo/DR_Excerpt3.htm
In it, it talks about removing tarnish. Unfortunately, the author uses a plugin that I cannot find anymore, but I was able to do a similar thing with the Select->Color Range menu in Photoshop. I won't try to repeat the other steps that are on the page, but I will say that following that guidance helped a lot. Here is my result:



I changed the hue of the background to make the man stand out more. I understand that such changes are frowned upon when restoring a photo, but since it was for me, I could take stylistic liberties.

 

[Tom Mann]

Yes, Asiva Selection was an absolutely wonderful plugin, and CTien's book is still an excellent reference.

I keep an old 32 bit version of PS on my computer just so I can still use old favorite plugins like that. However, as you correctly observed, you can get some of the selectivity using color range and other tools.

Tom M

PS - Nice job on the restoration.

 

[bbq_bob]

I repeated my effort using the method suggested by thebestcpu. It was far easier and I think it achieved a better result than my attempt. At least I've learned a couple of new tricks. Here is what I was quickly able to achieve using this approach.