Here is what I got using PaintShop Pro's salt and pepper filter and following it up with the High Pass Sharpen filter in the soft light blend mode. The settings on the spec size was 17, and sensitivity to specs was set to 2 for this.

PaintShop Pro has a similar filter, called salt and pepper under their add or remove noise section that I've been using for many years where you set the speck size (usually between 1-5 for most of my problems), and sensitivity to specs - usually around 3 from my experiences. And it does a very good job without smudging the image in most cases.

I'm so glad you brought up this topic. I had AfterShot 3 Standard installed but never did much with it, so I fired it up and tried it out on about 5 poorly done scans from 1998-1999 in pretty low resolution, and was amazed at how quick and easy it was to clean up the image and resave them as TIFF's to work on later with some other programs I use to enhance old photos. I also recently upgraded from PSP2019 to 2021, and was happily satisfied with the improvements that Corel had done with that program also. I was afraid when they bought the company from JASC that they would just milk it until it died, but hopefully that won't be the case. I still use LR for organizing, but am finding when I just need to do a few photos quickly, there are other ways of getting the job done well.

I've had the iP8720 for about 2 years now, and it's been great!

Here's what I could do with PaintShop Pro 2021 in about 5 minutes on your original faded photo. Do you think the colors are closer to what you remembered the room looked like when the original photo was taken? I'm curious.

Bill

(Download)

I've just upgraded from PaintShop Pro 2019 to 2021 and glad to see they've made some progress in enhancing the program. I do a lot of enhancing and retouching old photos and was able to bring out a good bit of sharpness with their Digital Noise Remover with a correction blend of 70 and Sharpness set to 100. And this was after using Topaz Sharpen AI to give the sharpness a boost first. For their $39.95 upgrade price, it's a worthwhile tool to have in my arsenal along with Affinity Photo PhotoScape X, and occasionally Topaz JPEG to RAW AI.

Also, Topaz Sharpen AI may work on some photos that need a bit more help.

I've seen rubber drive belts do similar things in consumer electronics equipment. I mention this because my Bessler 23c negative carrier had a drive belt that did this also.

And I've used Topaz JPEG to RAW AI in the past successfully also.