Digitally Restoring Historical Posters

It took me weeks to get the assets needed for poster printing. Most of the Disney attraction posters are over 30 years old, and they are usually not available anywhere, even as digital files. To find these digital poster assets, I spent days digging blogs and websites created by fellow Disney enthusiasts, I even rented and scanned books that contain printed images of the posters.

After a long process, I was able to get the digital image files for about 70 posters. However, many of them are very small in size, and what’s even worse, most of them have terrible color accuracy. They looked nothing like the posters I saw in the parks. I knew more work has to be done to get them close to printing quality, so I took on a challenge — to digitally restore and enhance these image files of historical posters to their original states. There were a few steps to this process…

The poster of Mark Twain Riverboat is much cleaner after restoration.

Step 1: Enhancing Resolution with AI

Small images will look blurry when printed on a large poster, so enhancements have to be done. I used Let’s Enhance to scale up the image with artificial intelligence. Comparing to sharpening the image in Photoshop with Bicubic Interpolation, it enhances the image with the knowledge it’s learned from analyzing a huge dataset of other images. Although it’s primarily built for photos and not really for poster arts, I found that it worked quite well nonetheless. That being said, I did do some more tweaking in Photoshop.

Step 2: Correcting Colors

Matching colors of two posters that have the same theme.

This is the primary and most annoying part of the process. Correcting the colors of an old file is very challenging, and it’s even harder without the right color references (a right color reference can be the official Poster Art of the Disney Parks book, a photo I took at the park of a poster, and etc.). Many of these files from online are compressed, so they only carry just enough color info, which means tweaking the colors too much may cause the image to lose details, so I had to be careful.

Each poster took me at least an afternoon of time — I played with the tone, contrast, levels, curves, exposure, vibrance, hue, saturation… you name it. For posters that I have a good color reference for, I usually start with the color matching function in Photoshop. But even with that, the colors are still far from accurate. This is a process of trials and errors, and I can’t really provide instruction on how to best do it since every file is different. Do prepare to sit down for a long time though…

The colors on the poster of Space Mountain is more vibrant after restoration.

Step 3: Correcting Angles

Most of the files I found online are the scanned images of past magazines or books that are no longer on the market. Since they are scanned, the sides and angles are often aligned incorrectly. I manually adjusted them with the crop and skew tools in Photoshop and used content-aware to expend the border a little, so that there is enough bleed around the edges for printing.

Step 4: Fine-tuning Final Details

Eventually, I just had to do a final, detailed check of the images to make sure they’re up to poster-printing standards. I used the spot healing tool to clean up the images and made sure every poster has the same amount of bleed (border) so that when they are printed and aligned side by side, they have the same height. I also replaced some Disney Parks logos with the vector versions, since they contain small texts and they’ll most likely be noticeable when printed on large posters.

And the process of digitally restoring digital files is done! It is time-consuming, but when I look at the folder with all the super-high-resolution images with beautiful colors and fine details, all the efforts were worth it for sure. I sent a total of 12 Disney attraction posters to print on flag fabric, 10 of them have a size of 60 x 95 cm (which I knew would fit a ceiling tile perfectly), and the other two are 90 x 150 cm. I had to communicate to the print shop that’s based in China to carefully make sure the size, style, and border finish are correct. Thankfully, they turned out perfectly.

The poster of Disneyland Railroad before and after restoration.

The poster of Jungle Cruise: Wildlife Expeditions before and after restoration.

The poster of Swiss Family Treehouse before and after restoration.

Putting the printed nylon Disney attraction posters up is challenging. I had to push the ceiling tiles up, stick the posters in, secure them with tapes, then carefully put the ceiling tiles back in place, all while making sure all posters have the same height and space between them. When that’s done, I had to iron them to minimize wrinkles and make them stick to the wall. It took me a few days, but all those efforts were definitely worth it, as the end result did turn out very well.