The Clone Stamp and Healing Brush are powerful tools for restoring damaged images. The two tools work in the same way, but their outcome is a little different. The clone stamp allows you to paint from one point to another and serves to cover up what was previously there, and the healing brush paints the pattern from one point to another, but blends color and darkness.

To use either tool, you must hold down the Alt key, and right click anywhere in the image to select your start point, then paint in the location you wish to cover up or blend.

While you are working and get into different areas of the image, you might find that your brush size is too small or large. If you left click on the image you can change your brush easily- I tend to use feathered brushes (those that fade out) more often, as a brush with a hard edge will be more apparent.

In the image to the right I have selected the clone stamp, and I've begun to paint from the top left corner over the finger-print. If I used the healing brush for this, once I finished painting, Photoshop would create a spot that would be lighter than the background (as it is trying to match what was there, to what I'm painting)- since I totally want to cover it up, I used the clone stamp.

With the clone stamp selected at the top of the screen under the menu bar there are more options to help refine the tool. (There are more options here for all the tools).

For the clone tool you can adjust the painting mode which will change how it blends, and also the opacity, to what degree it will blend into the background.

A place I wanted to use the healing brush rather than the clone tool was on the floor- I wanted to expand the bottom of the image to replace the text, but there really wasn't a shade of gray in the image that was light enough to paint onto the the area where the names were written. With the healing brush I painted a darker gray and it blended onto the floor leaving a natural tone. I had to apply it several times since the floor was totally white.

In the final image I adjusted the levels (Ctrl - L) to make the darkest gray 100% black, and the lightest gray 100% white to give the image a proper tonal range.

As you can see in the two middle images, you can see a bit of a grain to the image, so I ran a slight gaussian blur, and then an unsharp mask. This blurs it slightly to knock out some of the dotting and then sharpens the features that are there- "unsharp mask" sharpens. I also used despeckle ( all under the filter menu).

Last I reapplied the text at the bottom- in the larger image I wanted it to be fairly subtle, so I made the text white with a slight drop shadow.