The Salvator Mundi Digital Restoration was made using digital painting tools. Clone brushes were used to sample colors and textures of intact surface areas directly adjacent to damaged ones in order to replace the damage with the nearest approximation.

Working in digital media made it possible to work on each area separately using extreme zoom; it provided an infinite number of attempts to get each part right and also allowed saving multiple different copies. With some areas taking as many as 50 passes, the best parts of different passes were combined using layers. Opacity changes were used to mitigate the impact on the original pixels, taking a conservative attitude so as not to unnecessarily replace any part that was still usable. Areas that were completely missing were digitally repainted using clone brushes to sample nearby colors and textures. Parts of the figure’s robe that are missing were replaced with the preparatory drawings made by Leonardo, by changing their color and tone to match that of the painting. The black background was repainted using clone brushes to sample the surviving black background around the blessing hand.

When the digital restoration was finished, this restored version was then placed as a background layer underneath the original unrestored version. With the restored version in place as a scaffold or underpainting, a second pass at replacing the damaged pixels was made, this time using a touch sensitive eraser tool to gently erase “damaged” pixels to reveal the restored area underneath. This was done to further minimize changes to the original. Only the most distressed or missing areas were altered in order to achieve a uniform picture plane without retouching marks that would be an integral part of a 500-year-old painting.