I recently purchased a few cels from Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. However, I was disappointed that a few of them didn't have any backgrounds - not even a reproduction. I thought I'd share my process for creating high quality reproduction backgrounds taken from screen shots from the blu-ray versions of the game. I thought they turned out excellent, but you judge for yourself.
Usually screen captures are bad (especially printed screen shots) because the image size and resolution are so low. A DVD screen capture is typically 720x540 pixels or 10"x7.5" inches at 72 DPI. However, the blu-ray capture is 1440x1080 pixels or 20"x15" at 72 DPI. My largest Space Ace cel is 16.5"x13.5", which means I can actually increase the DPI of my screen shot, while reducing the width and height to match my cel size, resulting in a higher quality print. The bottom line is that the blu-ray quality print looks good - very good!
I first started by capturing the HD blu-ray versions of the games as movie files on my computer. Please note that Space Ace and Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp were released with both 4x3 (anamorphic) and 16x9 (widescreen) versions of the game and Dragon's Lair was only released in 16x9 (widescreen). The 4x3 version is the one to use because the original game was created for 4x3 monitors and the 16x9 version actually crops the 4x3 source, loosing art from the top and bottom of the screen.
After I have the digital files, I find the scene that matches the cel and start the process for extracting all individual frames in that sequence that share a matching background. Once I have these cels in Photoshop, I copy all the visible areas of the background from each frame into a single new "clean" background layer. Because of the cels positions, not all of the background may be exposed - there might be some areas that are always covered by parts of the painted cels. I could either leave them as is, because once I place my cel on top, it will never be seen, or I could try to match the background pattern to "fill in" the covered space.
Why not just print a screen shot of that actual frame rather than trying to clean the background? Because you'll never get it to size perfectly and will always see a shadow or ghost image below your cel - which personally, would drive me crazy.
Once I have my "clean" background, I create a quick scan of my original cel and use it to size my background. Once I know the width and height (in pixels) of the finished background I restore the "clean" background to full size and increase the DPI until the pixels match my desired size.
I did a test print and found that printed piece was darker than what appeared on my screen - probably because I was printing a RGB screen capture on a CMYK printer. Rather than converting to CMYK (which would change all the colors) I found that simply lightening my piece produced the right output. (I used Adjust>Variations and lightened the midtones one or two clicks). To smooth out any pixel artifacts I used a Surface Blur with 5 radius and 15 threshold (but this will vary by piece). This made the art smooth like the original water color, but not too blurry. I added two inches of padding around the entire piece. It added slightly to the cost, but I wanted to be sure that the margin around the print wouldn't be too close for me to position the cel on top.
Once the final piece was printed, I referenced a screen shot for positioning, made my crop marks and trimmed to size.
You'll notice in my attached files that the background didn't take up the entire width and height of the original cels, but it really makes a difference in how the piece looks. (Note: The explosion effect on the blue Space Ace cel was actually a digital enhancement that overlaid the cel. I included it as part of the background because it wouldn't have looked right without it.)
Let me know if you have any comments/questions, or if you need me to do a background for you. Now that I have the process down, I should be able to do them for a reasonable price.
BTW - I'm always looking for new Dragon's Lair and Space Ace cels, if anyone is selling.
Pete
http://playchoice.riemen.net
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