COMPLETE RECONSTRUCTION OF PAGE 44 FROM OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE 20

One of the latest examples of this process comes from Official Nintendo Magazine 27 - March 2008 (UK), where a single page had to be removed from the magazine before shipping it out.

From everything I have gathered, this was due to a misprint of the advertisement on page 43.
This PSP advert was not supposed to be in the magazine due to the licensing deal with Nintendo. Since this was the Official Nintendo Magazine after all.
It could only contain Nintendo advertisements in it, and thus this particular page needed to be removed, but since it was too late in the printing process, it was torn out of the magazines manually.

This meant that everyone who received this issue was left without page 43 and 44, my copy included.
I even ordered a second copy earlier this year as I didn't know of this at the time I scanned it.
Needless to say, this second copy, despite being in mint condition also had this page missing.
Identifying and locating the missing advertisement page was relatively simple.
The other side was anything but...

It looks like at the time, subscribers received an email telling them why the page was missing and directed them to a link to download a "hi-res JPEG" of the page in question.
16 years onwards and we can see how this page is anything but "hi-res" today.

And thus began my quest to reconstruct this page from zero, with just this low quality, highly compressed, tiny digital image as a guide to how the actual page originally looked.
Click below on the comparison page where you can see just how small this original page was, compared to the one that ended up in the magazine release you can grab from this site.

While I have done some truly extensive restoration work on magazines over the past 15 years,
this one is without a doubt the hardest one I had to do, but I'm really happy with the result.

PS: These full page preview images are all clickable to get to the full size pages.
So if you want to see in detail how this page evolved, just click on the pages below.

Enjoy!

THE ORIGINAL IMAGE

So this is the original image that I started off with.
As you can see, it looks very rough.
The text is grainy, has a ton of visual noise around it due to the massive amount of compression used. You can see this easily around the text that has a coloured background behind it.
Compared to everything else, the screenshots are looking somewhat decent, but the character art looks like it went through a sand blaster.

FROM START TO FINISH

From here on out I'll show you the steps it took to rebuild the backgrounds, icons and text, as well as replace all the screenshots with the original ones that came from a press kit.
I got really lucky there as something like that would otherwise have been impossible to recreate.
Same with the character artwork.

All of this took 6 days of work and a total of more than 25 hours to get the page looking as close to an exact match as possible.

After rebuilding most of the background, I put the original character art and screenshots back in, to get a feel of how it would look and to help me replace them in the exact way with their original assets from before they resized and compressed in the digital image that was downloaded all those years ago.
The result of which you can see below.

The page underneath shows how the characters of Astaroth and Taki were replaced with their original images (colour corrected and made to fit in as a scanned version of a printed page), as well as Ivy's whip, which was part of the larger image on page 45.

After this was done, it was time to replace all the screenshots in the same manner.

And finally, the shadow effect from Ivy's whip was added back into the image, on top of the screenshots to the left to create the finished page.

CLOSE-UPS