  AIMS: We investigate whether restoration techniques, such as those developed
for application to current observations, can be used to remove stray-light
degradation effects on archive CaII K full-disk observations. We analyze to
what extent these techniques can recover homogeneous time series of data.
METHODS:We develop a restoration algorithm based on a method presented by
Walton & Preminger (1999). We apply this algorithm to data for both present-day
and archive CaII K full-disk observations, which were acquired using the PSPT
mounted at the Rome Observatory, or obtained by digitization of Mt Wilson
photographic-archive spectroheliograms. RESULTS:We show that the restoring
algorithm improves both spatial resolution and photometric contrast of the
analyzed solar observations. We find that the improvement in spatial resolution
is similar for analyzed recent and archive data. On the other hand, the
improvement of photometric contrast is quite poor for the archive data, with
respect to the one obtained for the present-day images. We show that the
quality of restored archive data depends on the photographic calibration
applied to the original observations. In particular, photometry can be
recovered with a restoring algorithm if the photographic-calibration preserves
the intensity information stored in the original data, principally outside the
solar-disk observations.
