Refurbishing Modesty

* For an example of refurbishing an old paperback cover, consider the cover of Peter O'Donnell's I,LUCIFER from 1969, featuring British "danger girl" Modesty Blaise. I had seen this item on old bookstore shelves and one day got to searching on the Net to see if I could find a scan of the cover. What I found was this:

Refurbishing this cover seemed practical, but challenging: not only was the cover old and faded, the image wasn't even a scan, it was a photograph taken from an angle off the vertical, resulting in slightly skewed perspective. I was intrigued, wanting to see what I could do with it. What I ended up with was:

I went through the following steps:

• I cropped the image to isolate the cover itself.

• I stretched the cover horizontally to see if that would eliminate the skew. After tinkering with various stretch values, 5% seemed to give the best results.

• I tweaked the hue, brightness, and contrast to get rid of the faded appearance.

• I got rid of the cracks and creases in the cover by performing a zoom, then copying chunks of the image next to the crack over the crack using click and drag operations with a mouse. In some cases I did a bit of touchup painting on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

• This produced a much improved cover, but the text wasn't really centered, and so I added a strip to the right of the cover and then painted it in using mouse copy and drag operations from pieces of the original margin. In other words, the original cover appears slightly cropped compared to the refurbished cover.

• Now I had to fix the fonts. This was actually the hard part -- it almost always is. The fonts in the original were not only fuzzy and misaligned, there was "bleed" of colors between the fonts and their surroundings. For example, the title I,LUCIFER had an ugly orange halo around it. I think this phenomenon is partly due to bleed in the printing process, but JPEG image compression adds to it greatly.

  In the case of the author's name in yellow, I was able to repaint the existing letters by performing zoom and paint operations, drawing pixel by pixel. I started with the rectilinear letters like L,E,T; then did the letters that had curved corners like P, O, D -- once I'd drawn one corner right I could copy it to other corners; and then did the letters with sloped elements like R,N,y, which took a bit of hand-drawing and copying of strips of pixel shading.

• All the other text on the page was redrawn using fonts out of Microsoft Paint. The fonts were generally modified, with stretches and changes to make them come out right, but even then they weren't a perfect replacement for the existing fonts, having a slightly different size and spacing. I generally had to choose between completely accurate spacing and coming up with text that didn't look like hell, and so completely accurate spacing necessarily suffered.

  The title I,LUCIFER was a particular challenge. I couldn't find a perfect match in the Paint set of fonts, and there was only so much modification I could do with the closest approximation before I wrecked it. I managed to come up with something that looked somewhat like the original, though the differences between the fonts were obvious if the before and after covers were placed side by side. I didn't think I could do any better, but a day or two later I looked it over and thought: hmm, maybe I could do a bit better -- and to my surprise I could. Now it takes more than a casual glance to see the fonts aren't quite the same -- the "e" is the giveaway.

• Changing the fonts also involved cleaning up the color bleed around the letters by copy and move operations, plus some selective painting. Once done with the fonts, I did a general check of the image to perform useful tweaks, but after a point the tweaks tended to do as much harm as good.

I picked this cover as a example because it was one of the tougher refurbishing jobs I've done. More often a cover just needs some general cleanup and a few tweaks. I was obsessed with this one, I almost dropped everything else until I got it done to my satisfaction. Purists may not be happy with the liberties taken with the fonts, and the fonts also look a bit unnaturally crisp or "digital", but I have to judge those issues as necessary tradeoffs involved in the job.