Reviving original techniques for restoration.

A catalogue of restoration techniques can be treated as just that: a list of techniques and this is how restoration has been viewed largely in the past. The decision as to which technique or procedure to adopt was considered to be dependant on the element available, on identifying the system, and on the purpose for which the restoration is intended.

This approach is still and will remain, the procedure used for a lot of restoration, although interest is being expressed at reviving some of the original techniques used to produce the images in the first place. There are some tentative plans [1995] to revive the old imbibition process for making Technicolor prints and this has been seen as an opportunity to remake copies of old prints. This might be successful a way of recreating these old images but it should be recognised that new commercial development will almost certainly produce quite different process to the old one in order to compete with modern film stocks. It seems more likely that some small-scale laboratory reconstruction of an old process would be more relevant.

In many cases, it is quite simply impractical to consider resurrecting old processes. Such a thing may be possible with some of the early additive processes or some of the early subtractive processes that used simple three-strip analysis and imbibition or stripping films, but it is unthinkable for the majority of systems that involved complex multilayer film coatings or elaborate camera equipment. It would also be inconceivable that Dufay film could be made again in order to print and preserve Dufay negatives.