And in any cases, some aspects of restoration *are* creative (mainly the ones that involve filling in missing material), but those can be controversial.

Thanks for the kind words, David. With digital restoration, often one encounters elements about the original that are unknowable. A couple of examples follow. Segregated drinking fountain, North Carolina, 1938: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Segregation_1938.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Segregation_1938b.jpg The child is pushing away from the fountain and rotating on his hip with one foot raised, turning to get away from the photographer. Which suggests that the shot was taken very quickly: not much time to get an ideal composition. What was the photographer's intention? Many Americans of the 1930s had a view of the subject that would be intolerable today. Farm Security Administration photographers were discouraged from photographing racial issues so the fact that this image exists raises intriguing possibilities. That's a courthouse at upper left. It stayed in frame while the crop took out the curb, outbuilding, and power lines. There are several ways to explain the reasons for this crop in terms of overexposure and compositional principles, one of which is the dynamic effect of diagonal lines. There's a diagonal from the courthouse to the segregated fountain sign to the child: cropping kept that diagonal but moved the center off the child to a midpoint between the sign and the child, enhancing tension between the two. I don't know what John Vachon thought when he took this, but to my eye this is about the difference between law and justice. It's possible that I changed the entire POV of the photograph. ---- Early this year when I worked on the Wounded Knee Massacre restoration (which discovered four human remains and became a minor news story), it was a pattern of five dark spots which seemed to follow the contours of the snow that led to the discovery. http://durova.blogspot.com/2009/01/discoveries-and-tough-decisions.html These finds don't quite happen accidentally. I browse through thousands of files looking for ones that might have something interesting in them. That original had an unusual composition: why were there several large bundles in the foreground? The bibliographic record is often underdocumented, so subtle cues within the image itself may be all one ever has to go by. Old photographs often have thousands of dust and dirt specks. So how does one tell random degradation from meaningful information? Dust from blood? Genuine photographic elements often look slightly different from print damage, but software plugins aren't trustworthy at telling the difference. Intelligent decisions often require a knowledge of historic context. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lynching.jpg Yes, it's a lynching. His feet are only a few inches above the forest floor; his shadow nearly meets his foot. Beneath him there's also a discoloration. Is that a stain on the negative or real part of the scene? Well, it seems to be directly beneath something dripping from his left shoe. There appears to be a pattern of drip stains on the left leg of his overalls from the ankle to the knee. Then a similar discoloration in a circular pattern at his crotch. Could the elements be related? People who were being hanged have been known to lose bladder control. Yet I suspect something worse. Look at the stains on his shoe again. That's unusually dark for a urine stain, and it shines in the sunlight. Possibly dried blood. This man may have been castrated. High resolution digitized photos of lynching are hard to find. This one happened to have the right technical specifications for restoration; it is--within its gruesome subject--comparatively understated. Others show more obvious mutilation, often with a crowd of smiling vigilantes next to the corpse. The perpetrators were hardly ever prosecuted. I can't mention this speculation onsite because the circumstances are unconfirmed. The man's name and the location are unknown. The photograph was taken in 1925. ---- It helps to speak from experience when discussing digital restoration. -Durova -- http://durova.blogspot.com/