Photo-Restoration

If you've ever tried your hand at some photo-restoration, you'll know it can be a very long, sometimes frustrating ordeal. There are times when it's not so much the difficulty of the work, but the sheer tediousness of it. I'm currently working on a restoration which I can't show here yet as I don't have the necessary permission. It's for photorescuejapan.org, and they reached out via linkedin.com to ask for volunteer retouchers to restore photos that were badly damaged in the massive earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. After I'd filled in the appropriate paperwork and releases, they sent me a photo that, to be honest, was a bit of a nightmare. As soon as I get permission, I'll post that image and tell you all about it.
For now, I"ll tell you a little about the image above. In the big scheme of things, this one really wasn't all that bad to work on. I only used 2 tools for this, the Clone Stamp Tool and the Healing Brush Tool.
Going back and forth between the 2 worked very well for me. As you can see, most of the work involved repairing the cracks that ran through the photo and some rebuilding of the right side of the face, especially the eye. With a lot of blending and cloning, I eventually got things looking they way that I wanted them to. And when I say eventually, I mean after about 3 hours. This kind of work is not for everyone, but if you've got a good amount of patience and can look forward to the end result, you should give this a try.
And don't forget to put your retouching on a separate layer above the original. Also, set the layer to 'Current and Below' in the information bar across the top of Photoshop. This way, you're doing no damage whatsoever to the original layer. And save, save, save as you go.
One last thing, if photo-restoration is your thing, or you want to give it a go, contact photorescuejapan.org and see if you can help out with letting people get back photos of loved ones.
Peace