digital restoration project 

This was my first attempt at digitally restoring an 'old master'.

I worked on a 7.5 x 11.2 thousand pixel image, which isn't a lot for this purpose,

and the source image had its flaws to start with. Don't get me started on the state of the painting itself. It looks like someone ate their lunch on top of it.

I wanted to work conservatively, but ended up having to do a lot of guessing, and some parts (like the face) I had to basically re-create after removing the cracks. With the time I spent on it now, I would say my Lisa resembles the Lisa under the cracks, but at a closer look, it is clear that the genius, the exquisite balance of the proportions and in the shaping and shading of the original face, is lost to a large degree. 

This made me not want to publish the result initially, but now, after a while, I think that – as a whole – enough of the original work still lives in the clean piece, to make it worth sharing.