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Old photos provide a window to life in the past. A great deal of information is contained in those photos, but a lot of visual data has been lost, too—not just the color, but other features such as the subsurface scattering.

A couple of recent digital innovations have helped to bring old photos and paintings to life. There's a lot you can do with Photoshop, but there are limits to what you can accomplish with denoising, colorization, and superresolution. 

The result here has reduced some of the cragginess of the original Lincoln photo and made him look younger, but presumably that could be dialed differently. 

'Time Travel Rephotography' is a technique for recreating the natural, full-color appearance based on the the original photograph and an input photo of a contemporary person. The metrics of the modern person are shifted to match that of the historic person.

The way to test this method would be to take a photo of a contemporary person using an antique process and see if you could restore the missing information to match a high-res photo of that person.  

Another digital reconstruction tool is My Heritage, an app that takes a photographic input, or even old paintings or statues, and animates them with blinks and turns (Link to YouTube video). 

Because it draws power from large data sets, the results have some convincing nuances, such as the movement of bags under the eyes. I think it would actually be more effective if the movements were more limited and subtle.  

Combining these techniques and animating them with a motion-captured actor's performance would yield even better results.

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More about Time Travel Rephotography on Two Minute Papers

Thanks, Mel and Roger