Photo restoration - How did I do?

Found this old photo in my grandmother's belongings, can't remember if this is her mother or grandmother. Considering the age of the photo, it was in decent shape, so I figured it was a good sample to try my hand at restoration for the first time.

I didn't have any lighting with me, but had some decent window light and shot with my 6D and 40mm at 2.8. In PS, I used the patch tool, healing brush, clone stamp and content aware brush to remove the cracks and creases. Added a b&w layer with a tint, some curves layers, brushed in some contrast in her face and hair and added a vignette.

How did I do? Is there anything else I could do here to improve?

Original:

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/o6ts​uJ

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/onLv​3o

Looks great to me. Good job.

Agreed. Nice work.

Looks real nice, did you try sharpening at all? Just curious if it worked or not.

Thanks so much folks!

bk2life wrote in post #17045027
Looks real nice, did you try sharpening at all? Just curious if it worked or not.

There's a little bit of sharpening here with heavy masking. I'll check the settings tonight to be sure. IIRC, the sharpening introduced some noise in the shadows, so I had to bump up noise reduction as well. The values were pretty low though, nothing extreme going on.

After I posted this, I learned this is actually my great grandmother from my grandfather's side. She lived to be 107, and was 15 in this picture. If my math and family history are correct, that dates the original photo to around 1910. She lived an incredible life and was a great storyteller right up to the end of her years.

For the best fidelity, you should make a high quality scan and do this again. A photograph of a photograph just won't do it justice for such an important photo.

You restored it quite nicely.

CRCchemist wrote in post #17047668
For the best fidelity, you should make a high quality scan and do this again. A photograph of a photograph just won't do it justice for such an important photo.

You restored it quite nicely.

It doesn't really look like anything could be gained by scanning in this case though, at best you'd get high-quality dust and scratches, but I do agree that scanning is the best option. Even if an image is a bit big for the scanner, you can scan it in two parts and use align/blend to combine them.

Here's some restorations that I've done:

And some works in progress as well:
(sorry for double post)

KP, those are some great examples, very nice work! Some of those originals are beat up pretty badly. I didn't have to deal with any serious creases or rips in mine, are you using the clone stamp to fix those?

I'll have to look into high quality scanners in my area, thanks for the tips!

JoseCanseco wrote in post #17048038
KP, those are some great examples, very nice work! Some of those originals are beat up pretty badly. I didn't have to deal with any serious creases or rips in mine, are you using the clone stamp to fix those?

I'll have to look into high quality scanners in my area, thanks for the tips!

I use just about every tool Photoshop has, heal brush for spots and scratches, content aware fill for tears/missing space, patch tool if I'm not happy with content aware, copy+paste selection and then mask the layer if I want to use a specific part of the photo instead of clone, dodge+burn to fix tonal inconsistencies, and so on. Sometimes I'll even flat-out draw draw missing details like if someone's fingers got cut off the edge of a photo.
I also use a free program called Fiji to remove patterns from paper, as in the first example, using the FFT function. A lot of old photographs were printed on textured/patterned paper, so it's important to know how to do this. I also use Nik Silver Efex to "re-grain" images that I've removed the patterning from.

It also helps that I use a pen tablet, so I can do all selections and edits very accurately and quickly, if you happen to have any intent to do restorations on a professional level, I highly recommend getting a Wacom - pressure sensitivity is scientifically proven to reduce the chances of you tossing the PC out the window by 400%.

As for a scanner, I myself use an Epson V750 pro, which I believe is one of the best flatbed scanners out there, you can also scan film up to 8x10 with it, so you'll have all bases covered just in case someone comes in with a box of slides. You should never scan at less than 600PPI, I usually scan in at 800-1200PPI depending on the photo, and much more than that for film. A higher quality scan makes for cleaner edits.