Советский фотошоп - круче!
Year: ~1987
music at the end is the theme from siberiade by Eduard Artemyev
translation:
Turn on the red light.
There's a paper, there's pincers.
In the depths of empty sheet, a clumsy and slightly heavy
Reappears the old photo apparatus.
0:24 Some time ago, this photo was taken by it. The time has left it's tracks on it. The scratches and the cracks. But what if to try to remove them?
0:40 Such a device is a part of a computer. It turns our photo into electrical signals and writes them on a magnetic tape.
0:57 But on the computer's screen, the signals once again become the image. Each signal is a small square, and the whole image is being composed from them, like a mosaic. The real photo is not needed for machine anymore - it has remembered the photo well. But the man, the operator, helps the computer to detect the damaged places. The machine has to solve a difficult task: it has to calculate, what dark and light squares are missing, and to restore them on the screen. Another command...
1:48 This image hasn't used to look like this for tens of years. Now it can be transferred back to the photo paper.
2:12 This is the very way, how Vladimir Mayakovsky's portrait has come back to us
2:22 and the rare picture of Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya
2:27 and the obscure picture of the North Pole's explorer Otto Yurievich Schmidt.
2:37 But the electronic restorer is ready to make new miracles. Because it's work has just begun.