The Desmet Method (also known as Desmetcolor) is a method for restoring the colours of early silent films, which had originally been subjected to the processes of either: It was developed by Noël Desmet, a film archivist and restorer working for the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, Belgium.
[4] However, there are a number of different methods for restoring early coloured films today, each of which nonetheless comes with its own inherent strengths and weaknesses.
Beyond the possibility to make very slight improvements to the saturation this method offers little in the way of any colour restoration.
[5] It was largely as a result of these problems that Noël Desmet, starting in the 1960s, developed his own flashing method for restoring silent films, which had originally been coloured either by the process of tinting or toning (or both).
The result is effectively little more than a colour image on top of a black and white one but the illusion is quite convincing.
It is still technically possible to reproduce these vintage colour effects by means of the original methods today.
Moreover, many of the toxic dyes originally offered by manufacturers are no longer available today, on account of increased health and safety standards.
Another method worth mentioning, which has become increasingly common in recent years, is to transfer the original colour print to a high resolution digital format and manipulate the image in the digital domain before reconstituting it back on film.