MAMEWorld Forums - MAME Artwork: Official - Re: Side Trak bezel WIP pic

See, that's all there is to it!

Seriously though, nice job! Just by looking I thought you had cut out the tracks and reproduced the halftones. Sounds like you did it the hard way, but more accurate.

PS hello.

>
> This bezel took quite a bit of work to clean up, as it's mostly halftones. Where
> there was just a small scratch or color blemish, I used the clone stamp tool, and
> made sure that the halftone dots in the stamped area lined up with those in the area
> that needed fixing.
>
> The scanned image had a number of vertical strips where the colors were lighter or
> darker, or there was a sharp dark line, or what looked like a crease in the actual
> bezel running from top to bottom. What I would usually do to fix these is select a
> clean vertical area to the right or left of the area to be replaced, with a feathered
> edge of a few pixels, copy and paste it. This creates a new layer with only this
> strip on it. Nudge it over until it covers the offending area, then fine-tune it if
> necessary by skewing or distorting until the halftones line up perfectly with the
> bezel artwork on the layer underneath.
>
> The hardest part was fixing the bottom of the bezel, where something must have
> happened during the scan because that whole area is much darker than it should be,
> and the otherwise straight rows of halftones have a bit of waviness to them. I
> created a new layer and made a grayscale gradient, approximating the percentages of
> black that the original halftones should have been. After ascertaining the correct
> line screen and fiddling with the grayscale levels a bit, I turned the gradient into
> a halftone and knocked out the white background so only the black dots remained on
> the layer. I lined it up with the actual bezel halftones, which required a little
> fudging with scaling and placement. When I was satisfied with the alignment, I used
> layer style > color overlay, and eyedroppered the correct color. I also gave the
> halftone layer a very slight blur to match the existing bezel's halftones, they were
> too sharp otherwise.
>
> Just two more steps left: one, paint in the correct orange background color over the
> darker orange color at the bottom, covering up the existing halftones in that area as
> well. Second, make a duplicate of the original bezel layer and remove everything
> except the train tracks at the bottom, then make this the topmost layer so it covers
> the new orange and halftone areas (actually, this step should have been done before
> the one above). Flatten image or combine layers once you're happy with the results,
> otherwise the number of layers can get out of hand.
>
> Normally, when you're dealing with large areas of solid color that need to be fixed,
> you can just use the magic wand tool and some judicious modifying of the selection;
> then fill in with the appropriate color and you're done. Dealing with halftones is a
> different story if you want to keep the halftoned look; you have to tackle each area
> independently, as the dots can be a different size than those just 1/4" away. The
> good thing is that results don't have to be perfect; in fact, if you look close-up at
> halftones on bezels and marquees from the 80's you'll see a lot of halftone dots that
> are filled in, have some degree of dot gain, or are even missing, so the original
> printing has an imperfect look to it. Personally, I think that adds to the charm of
> the 30-year-old artwork.