anyone know about photoshop / photo restoration?

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I have an old photo that I would love to have blown up and printed on one of those big metal or wooden boards like Walgreens does. However, it is grainy and has poor resolution. I am not sure how possible photo restoration would be, and if I would have to send it to a professional or specialist or if it is possible for someone who knows their way around the program to fix it using photoshop. It is not a personal photo but more of a historical photo from behind the scenes of an old film.

Your best bet is to find the original. This is a copy scanned from a halftone print, you can tell by the subtle grid patterns that are formed. It was probably printed in a magazine. If you can find the magazine, it's possible to eliminate this sort of interference in the scanning process.

That, or if the original can't be found then you have to get creative with what's available.

If the image is very coarse-grained and "blocky" there's nothing much can be done to recover detail because it's gone, so any final result will be a compromise and more-so if enlarged - but this can be disguised somewhat and the image hopefully made more arty-looking (at the cost of some detail) by playing about with blurring and adding noise. It's a question of balancing one form of image distortion against another, more visually acceptable one.
I did that (plus some other tone-mapping manipulation outside of Photoshop) to get this, which looks much better full-sized. The grainy effect is lost here because the image has been reduced to 800x600 for posting but the original copy of it, at 3200x2470 (a 5x enlargement of yours at 640x494) should print to a reasonable poster size well enough.

Hi Banana247, you can't magically put in detail that's not there (unless you draw it in yourself) but here is my stab at it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7qkttv0j07u3r ... bfb8df.jpg

I've used a smoother bicubic rescale, then sharpened the lightness channel. It looks a little better I think, though you can still see the grain.

Thanks for the input friends! I knew you guys wouldn't let me down

Cornflake: That looks fabulous! I think the "artsy" look is perfect! One question... you mentioned that the image has been reduced in size for posting. Does this mean that I should acquire the larger version from you by another means to send in to the photo center? Or if I right click, go to the image url, and right click and save, would that suffice? Thanks again!! ! You rock!

Thanks - I'm pleased you like it. I quite like that image myself: the subject and composition are rather nice and it has a good "look" overall.

If you save the image above you'd just get the same size as it appears in the thread so it wouldn't be much use for printing, although I'd happily PM you a link for the full sized thing - but, before doing that, check to see what image sizes you can have made and any specific requirements for the image used to print it from (resolution vs. size, DPI etc) and PM that to me, when I'll try to produce something to suit.

Getting "arty" over "realistic" means a multitude of sins can be hidden to great effect, and an enlargement should be Ok for up to (say) 24" on the longest edge (and I hope I'm not going to regret saying that before trying it ).
While playing about I made quite a nice glow effect that gave it a different type of look, somehow adding more of a nostalgic feel to it - or that was my take of it, anyway - so you might be interested in seeing that as an effect (plus other film grain effects and different contrasts) before getting into final print images.
It's never going to be a detailed, high-resolution image and will always look better from a short distance - but lots of nice things can still be done with it.