The purpose of this paper is twofold: First aim is to seek for a proper formulation for recovering both sharp edges and smooth surfaces from a given, noisy, image. The formulations proposed here can be di erentiable, but as our numerical experiments show, so close to a nonsmooth problem that ordinary optimization methods for smooth problems, like the conjugate gradient method, have di culties in convergence. Hence, another aim of this paper is to compare di erent numerical methods for solving the image restoration problems. Two methods of nonsmooth optimization are applied: a (rst order) proximal bundle method and a (second order) bundle-Newton method. Moreover, a generalization of the active-set methods that have earlier shown high e ciency for nonsmooth image restoration problems is proposed and analysed. Comparison of the methods as well as comparison of formulations are made through numerical experiments.