Restoring an old panorama

While showing some of my posters and books at Friendship Day, a home owner here saked if I could restore an old photo that they had in a frame in the house. They wanted it done for an open house the following week, as it showed the view that was there when the house was built early in the last century. I said that I would be interested and they delivered it to me.

The two images captured by the camera

As you can see from the original copy I made of it, it was a set of 4 black and white photos which had been trimmed to match as well as possible at the edges. Brightness between the images was way off, there was some skew in each image that made the match relatively poor (though the image was interesting because of this, I thought) and there was no correction for lens distortion across the scene.
I set up my Nikon D80 with a 50 mm lens on a tripod with 2 strobes arranged at 45 degrees. I placed the original on a table under glass to keep it flat. The width of the image would require coverage of 2 shots. I probably would have been better of to place the image on the floor, since had to work around the tripod legs. A nearby window provided ambient light, but the strobes would flood the scene so that managing the ambient would not be a problem. I made a number of test exposures to balance the flash and find the best exposure. I captured the copy in two sections to be stitched together with Photoshop.
Once I had the raw images, I imported them into Lightroom and then loaded them up into Photoshop, retaining them as 16 bit color images. Using Photoshop's panorama function with manual adjustment, I arranged the two pieces as best as possible ignoring the brightness issues for the moment. I then created layers of the 4 original pieces and rotated them and moved them to find a better fit for the pieces than was possible with the original prints, by reducing the transparency of the top layer and using free transform to align the elements. This was particularly needed with the house in the right hand side, as the original match was fairly poor.

Partially processed in Photoshop.

Once I was satisfied with the new arrangement of the image parts, I uses the rubber cloning stamp to remove the joint artifacts between the images. I then used the brush tool with a low flow value to better balance the brightness between the segments. I left the bright segment of the house on the left for later adjustment in Lightroom. I saved the image once with the layers intact, then again as a flattened image to work with in Lightroom.
Once back in Lightroom, I applied a gradient darkening mask to adjust the brightness around the house on the left. I did some spotting. Then I noticed that there were two fence posts below the house on the left, which needed to be fixed. I copied the image back into Photoshop and removed the extraneous fencing.
Once this was done, I loaded them back into Lightroom and applied one of the black and white templates in Lightroom to convert the color image to black and white. Out of some twenty converstion templates, I found that one with higher contrast provided a better result.
The original frame was 6X18. I printed  the image on 11X17 matte paper to come as close as possible to the original style. However, this was too short for the frame, so I printed it again on 13X19 glossy and trimmed it to fit the frame.
I could have worked this a lot more in Photoshop to remove even more artifacts, however, I chose to leave some of the original defects in the final image to retain some of the antique quality. I did not attempt to remove the resulting lens distortion, as warping the images to achieve this would have skewed the images and likely resulted in more loss of image area after matching and cropping.
The resulting image removed the joint artifacts, had better light balance and contrast than the original. A close inspection revealed a person walking up the road on the right, something that the customer had not noticed. They were pleased with the result.

The final image

I enjoyed this challenge, and would like to see more work like this.