The Scream (ca. 1910) through the Years: from Photographic Documentation to Digital Rejuvenation

In our work, we accessed the museum's archival records and selected historic film slides to restore the past colors of the painting The Scream (ca. 1910) by Edvard Munch. The challenge is that some of these photographs were themselves subject to degradation, as it is obvious with the one from 1971, where the cyan dye heavily faded. Fortunately, from prior investigations, we are aware of which areas in the painting are stable and have not changed during the last decades. From these areas, we extract anchor points to define a transformation from the colors of the slides to the actual colors of the painting. By solving this equality with least-squares, we obtain a color correction matrix for each film, which enables us to peek into the painting's past