Horrendous DC Golden Age Reprint/Restoration

Here’s the methods I am familiar with

Selective Colour. Filter out everything but black. (Haven’t tried yet

Colour filters: infared, blue, red, yellow (haven’t tried but seems promising )

Selective threshold: have tired:
Not great

Magic wand selection; haven’t even touched

Are there any other technical solutions I’m missing?

 

Try this link or this link or this link.

 

Oh! I see it now.

Yup that looks better than mine

 

I used the magic wand for the example I posted. The truly labor intensive manual method is to use the polygon lasso tool and actually trace around all the black lines.

 

I cringe at the thought

If only we had a better, uncompressed scan

 

When I get back to the studio I’ll post my (in vain) selective threshold page one. Then I will start work on using the magic wand method

 

If your ultimate intent is to print the results then I'd hold off until you can find a better resolution source.

 

Be sure to play with the tolerance value. I used between 5 and 20. The lower the number the less pixels it selects. Feather your selection for a soft edge.

 

No, i think the final thing is just gonna be a PDF and 6 PNG files. I don’t think im gonna print it

 

Thanks for all your help, you are pushing us further! Let’s hope that the other pages aren’t as much work thanks to the printing proofs

 

There's two scans of that first page on heritage. There is the scan of the complete issue (with holes punched on the left side of the page) that you've been using (and which appears in post 107 of this thread) and then there is another scan of only page one here which is clearer and better. The complete-issue scan looks like someone took a lower-res scan and upsampled it to a higher resolution... it has the characteristic blurriness which results when that is done.

 

Yes, even though they are about the same resolution, you can actually see the color dot patterns in that one. I wish they would just do a professional scan of one of these originals. I love the colors and the texture.

 

here was my selective threshold version


...
yeah, its bad

 

As I suspected, the clearer scan Jason posted the link to presents its own problems, making the magic wand tool less effective in selecting the color because of the dot patterns. This time I used Hue/Saturation in combination with Levels and a teeny tiny bit of blur to smooth the jaggy edges.

Still not perfect, but further tinkering could get us to a decent black line only image. (There's bits of the dot pattern in his hair that needs to go away.)

 

Linework Restoration on page 2 is complete

 

Yep, this is why they opt for tracing for reprints. The technology just isn't there to get the color out of a poorly-printed old comic in a satisfactory manner.

 

I’m gonna try some other techniques later.

 

This is just beautiful



If only a DC27 could be scanned up to this quality. Even as just front and back covers they are still beautiful. There is enough resolution to fully resolve the CMYK printing dots.



Ps: I recently got a new scanner than can do up to 3600 dpi. (If anyone’s got 425,000. Grab it and crack it open! You can come over to my place and I’ll get you some 3600 dpi scans)

 

Linework restoration on pages 2,3 and 4 is complete. Starting page 5

 

Hello guys,

I've been following this thread with great interest.

I've been reading my copy of the Golden Age, Batman Omnibus, Vol 1 and it got me very curious about the source of the comics reprinted in it. From reading this thread I'm guessing that they used the second trace that was done for Detective Comics #27.

I don't think that any pictures of the Golden Age Omnibus have been uploaded to this thread yet? If anyone would like to see some I can upload some pictures from my copy.

It's a real shame that their don't seem to be any good reprints of these early, historical comics.

The Golden Age Omnibus Vol 1 looks really bad to my eyes and is missing lots of line detail when you compare to scans of the original comics.

 

Real pain that you can't just upload to the forum!

Here are the uploads of Batman Omnibus Vol 1.

3

 

Thanks. So they used trace job #2, the one prepared for the Famous 1st Edition tabloid. Too bad... it was a missed opportunity, not using the production proofs as a source.

 

Does anyone know the sources for the other books in the omnibus? Are they all trace jobs too?

 

I would guess. I'm not sure exactly at what point DC started keeping photostats of old material, but I don't think they have much of anything from the 40s. So any 40s-era reprints are going to be sourced from tracings. The existence of the production proofs of Detective 27 is a rare anomaly which would have allowed them to do a very high-quality reprint, but unfortunately they didn't bother to do it in the Omnibus.

 

Well, you guys have waited long enough: It's done!

A word to the process. This took a little longer than expected by it also was put on the back burner several times due to things coming up. I have also decided that since even after a lot of research I still can't find what color process DC was using in 1939 and I don't want to make assumptions, so my restoration is linework only. I also did a bunch of tests and couldn't get a decent extraction out of page 1 so I have decided to only use the proofs as the source and to do pages 2-6 instead of 1-6.

Anyway... I present to you: Batman's first appearance in Detective Comics #27. Enjoy!