When you lift a faded canvas you’re chasing the paint’s original pulse, so you start with a gentle brush, a careful grind, and a bit of solvent to bring out those hidden reds. The crack in a black‑and‑white print is a paper story—grain, cellulose shrinkage, and silver loss—so there you go straight for a mild deacidifier and a high‑contrast scan to see what’s buried under the dust. I still love my magnifier and my old‑school brushes, but I’ll let a little digital imaging do the heavy lifting if it means catching a layer that would otherwise stay buried. A little tech, a lot of patience—just don’t let the pixels erase the brushstrokes.