This tweet showing a partially restored painting where 500 years of grime, varnish and earlier conservation efforts got me thinking. We usually see all these fabulous old paintings through a patina of filth and there are people trying to strip them back to the artist’s original view…but with digital images and Photoshop could this be done virtually for a whole lot of artworks. We colourise old monochrome photographs, this would be akin to that, taking the image back to what it really looked like…
More details about this specific restoration work here.