Sunday, July 8, 2012

The Stranglers - Rattus Norvegicus
Released April 15, 1977

Wow, now this one was quite a project!
I couldn't find any high-res images of the original LP cover, all I could find was the CD re-issue, which cropped the original photo, and also had a larger font, and a different aspect ratio, since CD cases are slightly wider, and not perfectly square like a vinyl sleeve.  The only hi-resolution image I could find was this one, and I kept looking for something that might have been better, but found nothing.

After many color balance & contrast adjustments, I found a good level.  Now, the border had a lot of crappy glare around it, and I couldn't find a proper color for it, so I simply re-created it by getting rid of the old one using the magic wand tool (which I normally hate, but it proved useful here).  The magic wand created some shitty looking pixel deformation on the photo's red border, so, using the eyedropper tool I selected the border's color, and re-made it using the line tool with lines that were 5 pixels wide.  I had to erase around the edges of the text to get something smooth enough that would look good.  Luckily, there was enough blue tone from the glare around the text on the top of the image that I was able to save the original text, and I didn't have to trace it in illustrator or find the proper font, and figure out what size the font was at (that would have been a headache)

All-in-all, I was able to keep most of the original image, while only replacing a few bits, and I did my best to stay true to the original with the bits I replaced.  This is probably the biggest project I've done so far, and I hope it's satisfactory.  Let me know what you guys think of the finished product in the comments.

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