Laserschwert

Yes, I'm going to make a bunch of different versions, including that one.

Obviously there's only so much you can say about these. Getting there: It's weird to see so much more on the sides when you've gotten used to the cropped art over the years.

The restoration is coming along nicely: I was a little scared about painting out the logo, but besides using some great sources for the palm trees (unlike 13-or-so years ago, when I didn't have much to work with), I just went and repainted most of the sky. After all, it's just splotches of color, which can be conveniently sampled from inbetween the letters. Adding the appropriate amount of texture on top of it, it works quite well. However, I think I'll still include a logo-less version with a cloud overlay, like in my old versions. The bottom half of the artwork is still missing a bit of material to remove stickers and logos, but I have a few sources that I have yet to train AI models on.

It depends on the image, and how many sources I can collect. Apart from actually fixing dirt and damage to a scan, piecing together different sources is the most work in a restoration. And you're right: Color-correcting each one so that they all match can often be tricky. Usually I start out with the best quality source, and try to match everything else to that. Sometimes I need to color-correct different parts of the same scan with different settings, which in turn ups the layer count. Once everything is pieced together in a homogenous way, cleanup and color-correction of the complete image can happen. Regarding keeping my sources clean, in terms of color correction I usually use adjustment layers, so that the source itself isn't changed. But when aligning different scans, the pieces hardly ever fit together without warping or distorting them ever so slightly. That's why a simple swap of sources usually isn't possible. Luckily, aligning can be automated with a bunch of different tools. Most of the time Photoshop's own automatic alignment tool is good enough. In the case of the MI1 poster, which was made up of 15 separate scans, it worked right away. The Rebel Assault 2 poster on the other hand failed miserably (because of so much black space), so I resorted to Hugin, an open-source image stitching tool that can align images by manually placing marker pairs in the different images. It took a few hours of manual work, but the stitched image turned out great.

Nope, the poster was only using scans of game releases. Mainly the manuals of the Korean and Taiwanese version of MI2, plus several box scans. If I had access to scans of the original painting, the quality would be much, much higher. Noteworthy: The Korean manual seems to be the only available source of an unobstructed "LeChuck's Revenge" banner.

I guess it depends on what was used for the paintings. Acrylic paint basically turns into plastic once dried, so that should last a while. Oils are obviously more problematic, although it's not like these are renaissance paintings from a few hundred years ago. The painting surface can be the weak spot though... canvas, cardboard or MDF usually aren't water proof unless sealed. But as I understand it, the Lucas archive is a professionally cared for, temperature-controlled facility, so most stuff should be safe. As a matter of fact, Craig Derrick told me he's planning a trip to the archives soon. I asked him to especially look for boxart - originals and slides/transparencies - to at least make sure these are properly stored and modern scans could be made. I doubt that he's in a position to share anything for the poster project, but it would at least ease my mind a bit if these works can be confirmed to be safe. As for the quality of slides: Just look at the quality of the new MI poster. That one was most definitely created from a slide. The detail is very good, but as I mentioned above, there's still room for improvement. But that would require going back to the original painting, because all those shortcomings are now baked into those slides.

Yeah, MI1 is important enough to warrant multiple versions.

The big thing I'm thinking of are of course the original paintings. At least we know that MI2, FOA and Rebel Assault 2 are still in Purcell's and Eaken's possessions. As for stuff like MI1, MM, Zak or The Dig, they must be stored somewhere... I hope. Loom is an interesting one, because it's not a painting but a coloured pencil drawing. So most likely it was done on paper and is thus not as sturdy as paintings made on cardboard, MDF or canvas. Interestingly, GameHistoryOrg's Frank Cifaldi did initially have the MI1 poster photographed at a specialized vendor, but the quality couldn't compete with a flatbed scan, so he ended up scanning it on his A3 scanner. Edit: According to Frank, Steve Purcell confirmed that the poster's colors are accurate. So that settles that.

As great as this version of the artwork is, you can see the shortcomings of 80s physical film/optics and digital scanning technology. Some colors bleed into one another and edges aren't as refined as they could be. The MI2 artwork we derived from the magazine poster already looks more detailed. I'd wager that a modern scan of the artwork (or as I understand it, paintings are most of the time photographed instead of flatbed-scanned) would result in even more detail and much better colour reproduction. Color-correcting this will be a challenge too, since the different releases use many different color schemes for the art. Personally I'm partial to the Sega CD version's colors (which my current restorations leaned on heavily), though with this poster being a more definitive source, the end result will probably land somewhere inbetween.

It's the officially released promo poster, available back in the day through the Lucasfilm merch store.

Thanks to Jake, I finally got a chance to scan the official Monkey Island poster: Now there's a lot of cleaning up to do. Plus this is merely a starting point for creating a much better expanded and textless artwork.

I still haven't played much of the first game, because the controls feel so incredibly janky. So I'm afraid to not get the full dose of familiarity with returning characters and plot threads, thus diminishing my enjoyment. Is the sequel heavy on nostalgia for the first game?

My best guess is they shot themselves in the foot by promising certificates hand-signed by Ron Gilbert, and then accidentally selling multiple thousands of boxsets.

Sorry, I had nothing to do with it.

It's only been gone for a month or so, but it's still good to have it back.