Teen-Age Romances 042 1955-03.St. John cover (Darwination Before and After)
My current technique in photoshop is a total repair with heal stamp, clone stamp, and occasionally content aware fill. I'll use bits of lower res covers as a guide layer in back for missing sections and use textures and ink work from the rest of the cover to fill it out. Often you can rotate, invert, and otherwise manipulate parts of the cover you do have to clone from and complete lettering and art that you don't have. Areas with lots of line work (Casanova there's pants for example) need special attention as the heal stamp will obliterate the art. You should be careful not to "smudge out" the intricate printing patterns on a cover like this if you are looking for a true high resolution restore, but working with lower resolution images has advantages too in ease and quickness just not necessarily end result. Of course, at screen width you can get away with a lot that only becomes visible with magnification, so lower resolution restorations can work in a lot of situations and can be completed much faster.
Only at the very last minute do I do any color alterations. The last step takes almost no time, although we have many tools at our disposal to do the job. Level changes, curves, selective color modifications, vibrance, or the sledgehammers I usually recommend against with brightness/contrast/saturation changes. Picking the right tool(s) is the hardest part, as I never know which method or methods I'm going to go with until I tinker with it. The artful part has to do with taste. If a cover pops too much, it doesn't even look like paper any more. If it pops too little, you are doing the art a disservice in translating it to the digital age. You have to Goldilocks that shit.
There are times where parts of the periphery of the cover have to be fudged. I do this as little as possible, but it happens. Sometimes you use a little illusion for the sake of presenting the more important parts of the art. The danger, of course, is that for a truly rare publication, the only representation we might end up with has been altered in important ways. Because that paper is gonna crumble, but my image is gonna last forever, you dig?
Teen-Age Romances 042 1955-03.St. John cover (Darwination Before and After)
My current technique in photoshop is a total repair with heal stamp, clone stamp, and occasionally content aware fill. I'll use bits of lower res covers as a guide layer in back for missing sections and use textures and ink work from the rest of the cover to fill it out. Often you can rotate, invert, and otherwise manipulate parts of the cover you do have to clone from and complete lettering and art that you don't have. Areas with lots of line work (Casanova there's pants for example) need special attention as the heal stamp will obliterate the art. You should be careful not to "smudge out" the intricate printing patterns on a cover like this if you are looking for a true high resolution restore, but working with lower resolution images has advantages too in ease and quickness just not necessarily end result. Of course, at screen width you can get away with a lot that only becomes visible with magnification, so lower resolution restorations can work in a lot of situations and can be completed much faster.
Only at the very last minute do I do any color alterations. The last step takes almost no time, although we have many tools at our disposal to do the job. Level changes, curves, selective color modifications, vibrance, or the sledgehammers I usually recommend against with brightness/contrast/saturation changes. Picking the right tool(s) is the hardest part, as I never know which method or methods I'm going to go with until I tinker with it. The artful part has to do with taste. If a cover pops too much, it doesn't even look like paper any more. If it pops too little, you are doing the art a disservice in translating it to the digital age. You have to Goldilocks that shit.
There are times where parts of the periphery of the cover have to be fudged. I do this as little as possible, but it happens. Sometimes you use a little illusion for the sake of presenting the more important parts of the art. The danger, of course, is that for a truly rare publication, the only representation we might end up with has been altered in important ways. Because that paper is gonna crumble, but my image is gonna last forever, you dig?