Help/Tips Restoring Old Photographs

[astrostu]

I'm embarking on a 3-month project to restore my parents' wedding photos and then print them in a nice leather album for their 40th wedding anniversary on August 20. Problem is, these photos are in poor condition.


The only photos I have from my parents are polaroids I scanned back in 2004 as part of a separate project for my mom. I've asked my brother (who still lives nearby) to rescan those and any others he can possibly find. I was unable to find the larger 8x8 photos and have no idea where they might be (my dad was unhelpful 8 years ago ...).


When I was in New York two years ago, I scanned my dad's parents' photos from my parents' wedding, the 8x8s, on their mediocre scanner. I scanned one way and then rotated 180°, then did a min() combine in Photoshop because of the textured photographs causing saturated white pixels all over the place due to the direction of the scanner's light.


And I just got my mom's sister's only photo from her, 8x8, and just scanned that at 2400ppi on my new Epson V30 scanner.


1. So, I'm getting the photos in all mixed scan quality, and mixed preservation state.


2. They are in sore need of cleaning, which I can do manually but will take forever - are there tips to automating this? And by "cleaning" I really mean that with not only dust and scratches, but pockets of dirt all over the place.


3. The 8x8 prints are all textured, both from the original paper used and (in my aunt's case) degradation over time. I can do a median smoothing but that will remove other detail that's real that I want.


4. Colors in ALL photos are horribly faded and, being a young whipper snapper and born after a celebration of my parent's 10th anniversary, I wasn't there so don't know the original colors.




Given all this, is there a recommended workflow (I assume crop/rotate, clean, colorize?) to fixing these up? And within each step, what are the best ways to go about them (esp. cleaning and coloring)? I don't want to do this half-assed, but I also don't have 100s of hours to spend doing this at the pixel level. I can post examples if you'd like.