I used the following steps:
1. Used PS's polygonal lasso tool to quickly select an area slightly larger than the gap between the cut pieces.
2. Used PS's content aware fill (color adaptation on) to fill in the gap
3. Manually touched up any areas that content-aware fill had problems with. This involved multiple steps and several different tools.
4. I own 7 or 8 different noise reduction tools (most commercial, not free) in addition to the NR tools included in PS. Each of which works best on different types of noise. I tried a few of them and decided to use this one:
http://www.projects-software.com/denoise-projects/ . This required exporting the result of step #3 as a TIF, running the external program, and then bringing the image back into PS.
5. Applied the following PS adjustment layers: Curves (twice - different curves in different areas), Hue/Sat, and Vibrance/Sat.
6. Down rez-ed the image to < 700 px in the longer dimension so that the forum uploading software wouldn't try to compress it.
7. Applied some USM (Photoshop's unsharp masking) to slightly sharpen the image at its final resolution.
8. Posted the image in the forum.
If you are not familiar with a term like "content aware fill", just Google something like {"content aware fill" photoshop tutorial} and you will be amazed at how much information is available on any minute topic having to do with Photoshop, LOL.
The key to success in a process such as the above is not just simple familiarity with each of the tools used, but being able to select the best tool from among the many other tools available for the particular situation (ie, most effective, but fewest unintended consequences), and then applying it with appropriate internal settings as well as the best layer blend mode, layer opacity, layer BlendIF sliders, layer masks, etc. etc.
HTH,
Tom M
PS - I forgot a step: I manually "spotted" lots of the small imperfections in the image twice. Once at the very start, and once after contrast and more saturated colors had been developed to pick out the less obvious imperfections. I typically use a combination of PS's stamp tool, healing and spot healing brushes, and the patch tool.