Lunar snow removal

This was going to be a blurb about the restoration of Casablanca, Star Wars, and the Indiana Jones films. But when I started investigating the background of John Lowry, the magician who restores these old films frame-by-frame, I discovered something far more interesting. 

In the beginning, Lowry ran a little company in Toronto called Image Transform.  One of his earliest successes was cleaning up the dodgy black and white images broadcast from the moon by NASA astronauts.  At that point there were no digital televisions, so all manner of analog ghosting, fuzzing, and waviness crept in.  By transferring the images to film through a fancy set of electronic filters, he was able to bring out detail that was previously invisible.

These days, he runs Lowry Digital Images, the leading digital film restoration company.  The metal boxes standing behind him are just a few of the Apple PowerMacs his company uses to process terabytes of scanned images.  In addition to color correction, dust and scratch removal, the company has developed proprietary software to eliminate frame jitter and weave. The results are unbelievable -- Rock steady images without any of the flaws we're taken for granted for so long.  I own a restored copy of Casablanca, and can heartily recommend any of his other restorations, including North by Northwest (their first restoration), THX 1138, the Indiana Jones DVD boxed set, and the re-re-released Star Wars trilogy.