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A SOPHISTICATED imaging technique used to enhance fossils and ancient engravings may soon help you erase rips and creases from old photographs, using just an ordinary flatbed scanner.

Tom Malzbender of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues pioneered a method of taking scores of digital photographs of a textured object from slightly different angles to create a computer model of the object’s bumps and ridges. The team used it to bring carvings on previously unreadable ancient tablets into sharp relief (Â鶹´«Ã½, 7 April 2001, p 38). But back…