This image was sent to me by a former Crewman's son but it has fingerprints and surface smudges I haven't been able to "remove" through several editing programs.

I can handle the dust from the slide scan but not the "grease".

Again, I'm guessing that this can be worked out through layers but;

Wallace!! What do you mean, you are not good a retouching! Beautiful job! I don't think I need to submit mine now, but here goes.

Wallace, how did you get the ship brightened up no nicely? I had a lot of trouble with that and still not as clear, bright, and clean as yours.

I only worked on the sky

opened image
duplicated layer
scaled the top layer down to 10 x 7 pixels
scaled the top layer back up to 1024 x 704 pixels, this gives a clean sky and blurry carrier

scaled top layer again to 1024 x 804 pixels, then dragged the top layer down till top edges of both layers match, this is done to place the dark blurred carrier lower in the image so as not to be visible when combing layers

roughened the sky, as rendered in this way it has a too smooth plastic look to it

used a mask in the usual way to combine what is wanted from each layer

steve

I like what Steve did. It retains the original look, the shadow of the ship turns out bit strange, looking like mud if you edit the sea too much.
But you all did good job.