Fixing marquees

[jaharr01]

      Hey guys i have been working on a driving cab and I was messing around with Pinballx as a front end so I decided to add a second monitor to view the marquees. that set up was easy so far. As I said above its a driving only cab so it will only have around 800 or so Mame games, model 2, demul and etc. I found several higher resolution marquees, but there are still some that are horrific. So i was wondering what would be the best way to clean up these crappy marquees. the resolution on the monitor is around 1360 x 440. (using only the top part of the monitor.The rest will be hidden in the cab.)
     1. Would the best way be to convert them to AI files expand them to a larger resolution then try to clean them up a bit?
     2. Originality is not a huge is so another way would be to take the horrible ones and and completely redraw them from a flyer or something.
 
any help would be appreciated.

[lamprey]

      Hey guys i have been working on a driving cab and I was messing around with Pinballx as a front end so I decided to add a second monitor to view the marquees. that set up was easy so far. As I said above its a driving only cab so it will only have around 800 or so Mame games, model 2, demul and etc. I found several higher resolution marquees, but there are still some that are horrific. So i was wondering what would be the best way to clean up these crappy marquees. the resolution on the monitor is around 1360 x 440. (using only the top part of the monitor.The rest will be hidden in the cab.)
     1. Would the best way be to convert them to AI files expand them to a larger resolution then try to clean them up a bit?
     2. Originality is not a huge is so another way would be to take the horrible ones and and completely redraw them from a flyer or something.
 
any help would be appreciated.

I think the short answer is it really depends on what you are starting with and what your skill level is with different programs.

I have done a bunch of clean up and junk on images of bezels and marquees over the last couple of years so, my take is: garbage in, garbage out.

I'd love to hear some other techniques from people that actually do graphic work for a living. But, using Photoshop, one method that sometimes will work is to expand the size of the image to many times its original size, then apply different filters (like Sharpen) to try and enhance the image before scaling it down to the size you want. If you have a decently hi-res image that has some damage there are lots of ways that you can fix it up. One that can work, depending on the content, is the clone tool. This works really well for half-tones and such.

I'm sure there are lots of other techniques, but it seems to come down to lots of work in order to fix up images.

[thatpurplestuff]

For the vast majority of vector work, Photoshop has all the tools that you will need and the raster options in Photoshop can be helpful.  Working either in Photoshop or Illustrator, you need to get very familiar with the Pen Tool in order to create really clean artwork.  There are tracing options like vectormagic.com or the live trace features in Illustrator, but it will almost always look significantly better if you trace it out yourself manually.  This can take a while depending on your source artwork and your skill level, but it's usually well worth it in the end.