zombie84 said:
Lowry is a dirt removal algorithm, and dirt, generally speaking, is not part of the photography but foreign substance physically attached to the film through age/use and deservedly should be removed--its basically a more gentle way of running film through a cleaning bath. But it can--and has--been abused to remove grain that is part of the photography.

Ahh, I misunderstood. All I remembered was a comment about using Lowry's technique to supposedly make Citizen Kane crystal clear. In that case, it wouldn't be the same film anymore, but a simulation of what a clearer version would look like instead.

Dirt removal is good. But, is Lowry's process an actual cleaning/scan that directly interacts with the dirt? Or, is it merely a visual algorithm that compensates for the dirt? In the case of the latter, you'd still have to simulate what the image looked like before that dirt accumulated and it wouldn't be a precise view of what's underneath. (Though, if that's the only option to see the film in way that's closer to its original, clean state, then I'm all for it despite the tiny amounts of information loss.)

I guess my biggest issue is that simply because a certain amount of information (in an image) isn't precisely recognizable as a sharp object, that doesn't mean it is bad or useless information. First, it can be aesthetically pleasing and, second, it is coherent in the sense that it came from real objects and they are both worth preserving. To use this technology to try and restore what the films looked like originally doesn't bother me as much, but a technique that does this cleaning with the least amount of information loss would be preferable.