Before and after

A good friend of mine who recently lost his mother sent me this old photo of her as a teenager with some of her younger siblings (she was one of a family of 13!) and asked if I could fix it sufficiently to make a decent print. 

No-one knows where the original print is; all my friend had was a low-resolution scan, and it's not clear when that was done or by whom.

I've previously used bgjpg to enlarge low res scans, but I wasn't very happy with the results it gave on this image. So I decided I'd used this to try out Topaz Gigapixel AI (I was already trialling DeNoise AI) and it did a GREAT job. 

The causes of a lot of the marks and damage on the picture were pretty obvious. Some aspects of it, though, had me scratching my head about what exactly was done when the photo was taken, developed and printed. There are some adjacent parts, for example, which are sharp and blurred where the difference can't easily be explained by movement or DoF. 

Much as I'd have loved to solve these puzzles, that wasn't the object of the exercise.  After I'd fixed (as far as I could) the main problems and done the basic work to improve the faces, I had a final session today with my friend to get the contrast, sharpness, toning etc. just as he wanted it. He was delighted with the final result, so my job is done! :)