just finished rd!hetzel for the restoration \o/
hetzel is probably the hardest character in this whole restoration project if only the fact he kinda got screwed in the art department. his artwork in the (print) book is 1/3 the size of most characters (most of them have 1 page dedicated to them if not taking a whole spread) ....
he didn't get "official released" (digital) art like a lot of the others who may have suffered from gutter issues (oliver also got said extremely high-res digital art, saving him), and the in-game artwork for hetzel is well. measly pixels wide.....
so i had to figure out something better than my usual scanning since even at 700+dpi there's an upper bound to what an old scanner can do.
enter my old ass android phone that somehow takes better pictures than iphones. except the focal length is extremely sensitive. so the process was:
take multiple pictures of hetzel's top half and bottom half so i could start from crystal clear pix
USB-tether the phone so i can fish out the unresized images from the phone hard drive to the linux laptop
transform+rotate the two best layers over each other. retouch the edges
do a few passes of my old school smoothing filters
level the shit out of the colors
paint-retouch the edges + some of the worst discrepencies
repeat the last two steps until "close enough"
not doing that for any other character. it still isn't perfect but for an image that's like 4 inches tall tops i think the restored bit is pretty damn good and at least won't look like an outlier compared to the others despite being the same 3000px on the long side.
but why hetzel u might ask?
no child character senator left behind ~ /s
can you imagine the sheer joy a hetzel yumeshipper would have that their problematic blorbo grandpa got the same if not more love as other characters for probably the only time in their life :p (ok for real if a hetzel shipper exists congrats on the based diabolical brain. can i talk to you or at least link to you.)
i enjoy the sadism/consistency lol lol
