How to reconstruct a vintage court card

I just finished the last court card for the Dondorf Playing Cards and I wanted to share with you the process.

One question I get asked a lot is what programs I use. The only program you really need is a program where you can create vector files. Adobe Illustrator is probably the best solution since everyone is using it and you don't get in trouble with a printing company since they also use the same program.

However, I work with two different programs. Paint Shop Pro and Corel Draw. Paint Shop Pro as alternative to Photoshop and Corel Draw is my alternative to Illustrator. I use Paint shop Pro since I'm 11 y/o. So it's difficult for me to get used to something else.

STEP ONE - the photo

A few years ago I probably would have used a scanner, but everything is way simpler and faster now if you just take a photo with your phone of the card that you want to reconstruct.
As you can see in the image, I didn't care a lot about the right angle since I can adjust everything on the computer. I also didn't have the best lighting, so a lot important details aren't 100% sharp. But even that isn't that important.

Paint Shop Pro's Perspective Correction tool lets you fix perspective distortions by positioning a bounding box over the distorted card. You can move the handles of the bounding box by specifying their x and y coordinates. And in this case it really couldn't be easier. You just place the four handles on the four edges of the court card frame. A double mouse click and the perspective is fixed.

STEP TWO - the color

As you can see the photo of the court has a lot different colors. The goal is it to get four different colors on four separate layers. I tried a few different methods, different contrast etc. But you receive the best result if you simply paint over everything with the brush tool. It sounds time consuming because it is. You really need a lot patience here. I've never really looked at the time that closely, but I would say it takes at least five hours. Of course, it always depends on the level of detail of the court card.

Use high-contrast colors that are clearly separated from each other. This get's important later on.

For bigger areas I also use the gradient tool but only with the brush you can work precisely and you can recreate details on a court card which aren't really visible anymore because of the wear and tear over the years.

A lot vintage court cards have five different colors. Black, blue, red, yellow and green. Green. Green got completely removed during the digitation. I'm also not the biggest fan of the green tone, that's why I replaced it with black as well.

A few hours later your card already looks a bit different:

STEP THREE - the vectorization

I copy and paste the whole image from Paint Shop Pro to Corel Draw where I vectorize the file.

If you aren't familiar with this vectorizing process I can only recommend to look into it. To explain everything would go beyond the scope. But it really isn't that complicated.

There are just a few steps that you need to do.

1) Select RGB colors.
2) Select the amount of colors
3) Put a checkmark on "Group objects by color"
4) Vectorize everything with the highest level of detail.

You have already reduced everything to four colors when you painted over in step two. But the vectorizing program is a bit stupid. If you put everything on the highest level of detail you get over 100 different colors. 20x almost the same blue, 20x almost the same red etc. That's why you need to change the amount of colors. Normally to 5. Then you also get a group with a white color that you can simply delete.

The reason for the high-contrast colors was the vectorizing process so that the colors - especially black and blue - don't get mixed together.

STEP FOUR - final touches

You have a vectorized card now with all four colors separated in groups.

These groups have dozens of layers in the same color. The fact that they are all in one group makes it really easy to combine them to only one so that you end up with just four different layers for each color. That's nothing you need to do, you can also keep everything in a group. One layer for each color is just cleaner and I like that a lot.

You need to change the high-contrast RGB colors to the final CMYK colors. You'll see that is pretty easy with only four groups or layers.

You can also reshape all the details now that you don't like.
In my case I just replaced the "B" (Bube - German for Jack) with a "J" and I adjusted the width a bit so that it fits perfectly on a poker card.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Of course there are a lot more tricks that I use. But that would make everything way too complicated for this explanation.

The paint over method with the brush is only possible in this case since I still wanted to achieve a vintage look for the court card. This is far away from a clean court card where everything is 100% mirrored and perfectly detailed. I just want to mention this really has nothing to to with laziness. :D In fact I also already started to create completely clean and modern versions of the courts.

Let me know what you think and if you wanna see more "How to..." posts in the future.

Much love

Daniel