“hat is a well preserved picture”
Having restored photos in a wet photp lab, i find the abilities of the new computer programs to bring out the almost unseeable parts of old photos and negatives is like magic.
You need to see the documentary on how “They Shall Not Grow Old” was made. There was some footage that was just black with flickers of gray. Total loss. How they pulled out the images is unbelievable.
We have an experience in common!
When I was in the Air Force (back when pterodactyls were flying) we recorded data on 400’ rolls of TriX film.
One day; after processing one of them, the entire roll had been exposed and the emulsion was just black everywhere.
I saw that this was useless and tossed in into the trash.
(Did I mention we considered the data captured on film to be top secret?)
I escaped being court martialed, received a SEVERE warning and was told that Langley could have possibly extracted the data anyway; ‘somehow’.