OK - time to show all........Nick contacted me some weeks back and he sent me the following images and asked if I could help....as you will see , this was pretty ugly
It was probably the biggest task I have undertaken in Photoshop but I said I would give it a shake.......the GOOD news for me was that Nick had scanned his playfield in at the CORRECT sizes, so that made the job , not easy......but easier than it otherwise would have been.
I had no real concerns in tracing, re-drawing this but sizing and colour matching are ALWAYS a pain in the butt.
I thought I would show quite a few progress shots of this so people can get some idea of ( at least the way I do ) the Photoshop process.
SO I started by doing the diamond pattern ..........dont worry about the colours until the end , we just wanted it to be close while we made the new image....
It ended up as a layer like this
Next up I started the Green/Black sections up the top...hoping they were 'close' to being positioned correctly..
Next up I decided to do all the inserts and text next, I had to re-draw most of the text which meant outlining the black surround and rewriting most of the WHITE lettering so it would print nice and white.
Next up came the ghosts - another forum member Ian had provided some REALLY nice photos for these so I was able to copy them from the photos but I had to recolour them on this new image.
Heres some close ups of some of the above sections.....
Nick did an overall B&W print to check the size and after one night of adjusting, we had the overall size of this perfect
We were pretty happy with the progress but unsure of the placements for the inserts , ghost etc.....we tried a couple of things to work out how to translate to each other over email where I needed to line these things up......Nick came up with the idea of placing his B&W print on his PF and marking it up , scanning the marked B&W image in again and he re-sent it to me......I was then able to lay it into my image as a new layer and work from nicks markings......see below
Next I started dropping the inserts onto the image as can be seen in this next shot....if you look at the far left insert I faded it out so you can see how I could 'see through it' to place these correctly.
After this was done it was back to Nick for another B&W test print......you can see it below...the inserts, green area's were pretty close and I just had to jiggle a few bits around here and there ......
To get the ghosts correct - Nick did another print, and cut the ghost shapes out of the print, placed it over his actual playfield and resent me images like this one below, this allowed me to see exactly where I needed to move or skew things to so that these ghosts and the relevant text sat in the correct spot...as you can see this ghost of mine needed to come to the right at a bit
After all of that and some colour matching - here are the end results.....the 'on-screen colours' may look a little wierd but Nick has done test prints from many colour swatches I sent him and these colours apparently PRINT close/exact to the original PF colours
All up I reckon about 20 ++ hours work in it - I am hoping Nicks printer does an outstanding job and allows this part of the "HH restore of the century" to be as nice as the rest of the machine.
Saint Wotto
