I don’t know how much of it I’ll end up posting on here but I thought I would start systematically going through all the bits I acquired recently and randomly picked this Ultima Underworld advert from the pile. A large part of the collection is various proofs for magazine ad’s + their negatives such as this. All cool stuff to own for an Origin obsessive but I’m not entirely sure what to do with them now I’ve got them. This particular advert mainly consists of some extremely positive magazine quotes from around the world.

The negatives come as a set of four with the usual Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black used in printing. When building the proof you would use these to add a colour at a time in the specified order as I understand. As to what I can do with them myself, I suppose I could take them down to the printers and get nice clean prints which could be tempting with some of the full page ads. If they could be blown up to poster size, even better.

Since we’ve all gone digital these days, it occurred to me that if I ever did want to do that it would be a whole lot cheaper to scan and combine them all myself. Also, I think I’ve only got negatives and no proofs for some of these things so I can’t even see what they look like. This sounded like a good excuse to play around with Photoshop if there ever was one. My Photoshop skills were non existant but I managed to learn enough to create a CMYK image, paste inverted scans of the negatives into the appropriate colours and rotate them to roughly fit together. I ultimately came up with this:-

Admittedly it’s not perfect. The background is a very off white, and I definitely should have used a better rotational algorithm when I was lining everything up but as a proof of concept it’s a lot better than I’d hoped. The colours are brighter than the scanned proof but come out near enough exactly the same when printed. Higher resolution scans and a little more care and attention and I reckon I could get these looking near enough spot on. Whether I’ll ever actually do that is another matter, but I did enjoy messing around with Photoshop.

By the way, if you ever wondered why printing proofs have all the little lines on the page, trying to align all 4 layers will soon make it abundantly clear.