Bump. Where are we at with this?
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*edit* I just realized jp335i supplied the art for MKII to Szabo already and that's who I got the NOS marquee from. Did he not supply a scan of the marquee? Joe mentioned the one he used was yellowed, but jp335i has a NOS one in his game too. I'm confused.
At this point I'm just not sure if there's anyone out there who has a decent scan....
All,
I finally made it down to my storage unit and retrieved my NOS MKII marquee. I scanned it using my home scanner and it came out super dark, so I took it to work and threw it on a large Xerox copier and the same thing happened...no matter how high I set the quality. I didn't want to start messing with the contrast and brightness levels because it would make the artwork appear washed out (or too dark) and inaccurate overall. I think the best approach to this marquee (being so dark and all) is to scan it while it's being backlit so that the scanner can obtain all the detail in the clouds. Then the clouds can be re-adjusted back to being a bit darker so it matches the marquee when it's not being backlit. I'm not a professional photographer or graphic designer, but I've dealt with enough of each in my time to know that it's always better to remove elements (pixels, colors, levels, etc.) from a piece of art rather than try to add them back in after the fact.
If you take a look at the attached image from a post I did on my site where I compare a yellow'd marquee (on top) to my mint NOS marquee (zero yellowing), you can see how much more detail the clouds have when backlit (by the Sun in this case). I'm thinking since the Sun is the most natural of all light, I'll just affix the marquee to a window at high noon and use a wand scanner on it there.
I also like szabosarcades idea of vectorizing the letters and adding them to a layer of the raster clouds. This will keep the lettering super sharp, so as long as the clouds and lightning can be matched, I think this we can finally put this matter to rest.
I'm fully open to any criticism on this idea, so let me know what you think!
Excellent update! Glad to see progress on this.