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I have the old photo above that I want to recover as much as I reasonably can. Normally, I use the clone tool to try and deal with splotches like this. However, that would take forever here. When I try to use blur, I blur in the scratches which turns black hair white.
My new thought is to create a new layer using "select color range" that is the color of the scratches. That seems to work relatively well with selecting sections that are scratched. What I would like to do us use something like the blur tool and use the areas of the background that are not scratched to blur into the new scratches layer. This would drag close to the correct colors that are nearby into the scratches. Is something like this possible? Is there a better solution I am not considering?