BEFORE & AFTER GALLERY
One of the key differences of the Movie Posters Perfected collection is that unlike virtually any other online poster collection, we’ve spent hundreds of hours meticulously retouching many of our posters. And you reap the benefit.
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As an art director by trade, I have high standards for image quality, and I wanted the posters in my collection to look as good as possible—and you get to enjoy the results. I’ve worked professionally with digital images for over 30 years, so I can lean on that experience to retouch images in the collection myself, which is not something other online movie poster collections can offer.
When it comes to retouching, vintage movie posters typically have three “generations” of image degradation:
generation 1
Physical Condition
Unless the original printed poster is in true mint condition, it is very likely to have natural aging effects like yellowed paper stock, faded colors, dirt, and tears.
And if a poster wasn’t stored rolled up, it may have been sitting folded in storage for decades, creating creases that are very difficult to remove from an image.
generation 2
Image Capture
Digitizing a poster means it had to be photographed or scanned, introducing another generation of degradation.
Photography can introduce unintended lighting in the poster, creating shadows, highlights, or uneven color tones throughout. Scanning might introduce hundreds of dust particles if the scanner wasn’t thoroughly cleaned.
generation 3
File Compression
Image files are often saved in JPEG format, which employs “lossy” compression. Valuable image data is thrown out in favor of small file sizes, creating telltale, irreversible compression artifacts.
If an image is too severely compressed or simply lacks resolution, it is generally not worth retouching and not a good candidate for the library.
In our collection, not all posters have been given a full restoration, but all of them have had at least basic cleanup performed to reduce, minimize, or eliminate dust, dirt, scratches, tears, irregular color, aging paper, and in some cases, folds and creases. I do all my retouching by hand and do not run any automatic image clean-up processes like the “Dust & Scratches” filter in Photoshop, which causes the entire image to lose detail in an attempt to automate the removal of every artifact in one fell swoop. Good retouching requires more care and attention to detail than that.
All posters have also had their black levels adjusted so that they can achieve perfect black on OLED displays—which looks great on LED displays, too. No other poster collection would take the time to do this. This step can even improve modern movie posters, which are always created digitally, but not necessarily with the infinite contrast ratio of OLED displays in mind.
Here’s a video demonstrating how we retouch a vintage movie poster before we add it to the library.
Over time my goal is to revisit every vintage poster in the collection to remove evidence of folds and creases as well, but those artifacts are very time-consuming to remove and in some cases require recreating patches of art by hand if sections cannot be rescued. If there’s a particular poster in the collection that you’d like to see get a little extra love, feel free to drop me a note and I’ll prioritize it.
Here are just a few Before & After examples from our collection.
To see the most detail, view the gallery samples in full-screen by clicking the ⛶ icon in the upper-right corner of each image.