Restoration

I'm going to say this right up front:  I'm no expert on photo restoration.  But Vic asked me if I'd see what I could do with some old photos that he had scanned, and I said that although I couldn't make any guarantees, I'd do what I could.  More than likely many of you looking at this will shake your heads, since you might be more adept at this type of thing, and I'm seriously just winging it!  If so, could you comment with some tips on how to go about this?  I'm predominantly in Lightroom, with a bit of cloning in PSE.  Frankly, I find anything to do with PSE frustrating, I can't seem to use the selection tools easily and I end wanting to pull my hair out when what I want to have happen DOESN'T.  And so many of you find it so easy that I'm wondering what is wrong with me! LOL  I need a PSE intervention.  What I need, probably, is CS5 for more ease of control--but that's not happening any time soon, I'm afraid.

Most are little snapshots that are extremely out of focus, so I just bumped the contrast and cleaned up a few marks on the faces, since I really can't spend hours and hours on these.  

But this photo was gorgeous, so I spent a bit more time on it.

Unfortunately, since I really don't know what I'm doing with this type of thing, the photo looks somewhat soft, but if you could zoom into the face, you'll see a great deal of improvement in it, since it originally looked as if a piece of sandpaper had been scrubbed over the photo.

I'm going to go back and see about fixing that softness and bumping up the blacks, also work on that patch of white in the bottom left.  In the meantime, especially for the family, you can at least see what I'm attempting to do!