Restoring Art Is Good

A clever use of 3D printing may make art more enduring and lasting

Art restoration is good in theory and practice, but it is often painstakingly slow and inefficient. But fear not, art lovers! An MIT graduate student named Alex Kachkine has developed a new process that uses 3D printing and AI to restore paintings in hours, not months or years.

His technique involves creating transparent, color-matched "masks" that are applied directly onto damaged areas. It’s a process that leaves the original work untouched, thus it is fully reversible and modifiable. As detailed in his paper in Nature, it's a process with immense promise: it leaves a permanent digital record and boasts incredible efficiency (a 15th-century painting with thousands of pockmarks and surface damages, for example, was restored in just 3.5 hours).

More after the bump.