Below are restorations of Edward S. Curtis photogravures from the book, "The North American Indian".
Restoring these was more difficult than I thought it would be. The originals were on cream-colored paper with brown ink, and getting the colors right while keeping a deepness to them was fairly difficult.
Texture from the paper also became an issue -- i.e. how to keep the definition and a paper feel to it, while reducing the texuring problems that occur during restoration.
Some of the scans have a very nice golden tone to them and make a nice artistic statement by themselves. If you look at some, while not accurate, the golden tone looks very nice. While, with others, much fading has occurred.
The nice yellow tone might be an aspect of the scanning process, as many scanners automatically adjust for contrast, so faded pictures will tend to look much nicer on a monitor with its high contrast than on paper.
