Hi Kate
I'm coming in a bit late on this, but I wanted to post the image I color corrected using both Curves and Levels, as well as the rather down and dirty way I recreated the fur of the rug for the right side of the bottom. It needs to be worked on more, but I'll tell you what I think is the best way to handle it. First I'll post the image:
I used the healing and patch tools intermittently for the rug. I sampled small areas from the good portion under his leg on the left and in the left corner and kept adding to the samples until I filled up a decent-sized area. I kept sampling until I got rid of obvious repeats in the pattern and shading until I got something that looked okay (as I said, it's down and dirty, but gives you an idea). A lot of the background cleanup was done by selecting bad areas and then filling them with content-aware fill. That worked really well.
Something that I just learned in a tutorial - and I may be way behind the times on this - is the clone source menu. It's amazing. I just cloned one striped area on the sleeve and asked the clone source to rotate it 180 degrees. Probably the best way to accomplish a credible copy of the good arm would be to clone each section to its own layer and then tweak and distort as you need to. But the clone source will give you a good start. Use a hard edge and 100% opacity and flow - then you can mask out anything that doesn't fit.
Also, I used calculations to get a B&W template for his leg. I used gray and the blue channel and set the blend mode to pin light, then saved the image as an alpha channel. I still find that calculations gives me the best template when I'm trying to see behind the muck.
Here's the image:
I hope this helps and doesn't confuse things. I hate to see you get discouraged, because this little guy can be completely restored, and I think you can get a good color correction. I know we all have different ways to go about these things, but I thought I'd share what works for me. Since I've been retired for more than a year now, I've spent a lot of time taking webinars and tutorials, and have discovered some wonderful new ways to defeat these stinkers.
BTW, it looks to me as if his trousers have a pattern on them. It's faint, but it seems more than just debris.
Good luck!
GK
Once I posted this and could see the images, I realize that the rug still needs a lot of work. I still see obvious repeats. But working at it will help with that. And possibly the clone source will help move the direction of the fibers to a correct alignment.
