Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds

Spirits is an interesting film... it is quite arty, with strange production design and an eerie ethereal score. And it has some great posters.

The restoration process:

1. I found the original image online via Google Images. It was at a much lower resolution, and with a black background (instead of clouds).
2. I used Upscayl (using the digital art model) to bring up the resolution 8 times. This digital art model really is excellent - it did introduce a few hallucinated artifacts, but I found these quite interesting and so left them in.
3. I removed the black background (around the square-ish middle) to leave it transparent, keeping the text.
4. I found a nice high-res cloud image to put on a bottom layer. It is actually a sky from the Australian outback, for what its worth.
5. Although I did some feathering when I removed the background, there was still a little jaggedness on the outline of the centerpiece I was not comfortable with, so I went over the edges with a bit of tactical motion blurring to smooth them out.
6. I denoised the cloud backing very slightly - I'd rather lose a little detail here then for the noise to conflict with the very smooth interior artwork.

I hired the same printing and framing studio I've used previously to do an A0 print on premium matte paper. I'm quite pleased with the final result, though if I had to pick flaws I'd probably raise the brightness on the cloud background a bit to bring it closer to "real" sky blue.

It really does feel like it brings more air into my bedroom, somehow. :)