Abstract: The present invention discloses a method for film archival based upon digitization of dye densities of the film. In particular, by using the analytical densities of the dyes and the dye concentrations at each pixel, the present invention provides a method for determining the color of the particular pixel where such color value is not influenced by aging of the film substrate or chemical degradation of the color dyes used. If the analytical densities of a film are known, then the concentration of each dye can be estimated by measuring the logarithm of the transmission of the film in as few as three frequency bands. The error involved in this digitization is a function of filter bandwidth and a function of the number of spectral transmission measurements used for the dye concentration estimation. The present invention is directly applicable in the field of film restoration and corresponding methods and devices for film restoration are disclosed.