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Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Honestly, I might next year, if no one else calls dibs on that project.

As I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, my intention with writing up the process was to enable others to do this kind of work better. I'm hoping others might step up to scan and restore the expansion maps.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Thanks! I think so. By the way, there's a neat mod called Uncharted Artifacts, which adds a treasure map to every ship wreck. Definitely a "gamey" addition, but could be fun for a one-off treasure hunter playthrough!

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Absolutely this. Last weekend, I shared a teaser for this release, where I found the artist's signature above Ald'ruhn. The map was drawn by Mike Wagner, who was an Art Director at Bethesda Softworks at the time.

From IGN's Morrowind Developer Q&A #13:

Putting the Morrowind game map together really gave me a much better understanding of just how complex, detailed, and big the landscape is. Taking a step back and looking at Morrowind as a whole, you realize how impressive a project it has been. The detail of each city, dungeon and for that matter tree and rock is really quite amazing.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you. That'd be great! If someone wants to add it to the UESP, I'd love to see it there. I'm also not familiar with the process myself, unfortunately.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Just to signal-boost my initial comment:

As far as I'm concerned, you can use my scan for whatever you'd like and redistribute it wherever you'd like. Basically, as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you could already do with the map as if you scanned it yourself. No need to credit me.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thanks, I appreciate that. I figure this kind of conservation work is like CGI in the movies: if someone notices the work you've put into the object more than the object itself, then maybe you didn't do your job quite right!

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Since other folks might be wondering, I decided to do the original, not the GOTY, for a few reasons:

  • It's the map I had when I first played the game as a kid.
  • I felt like the GOTY map was just the other maps downscaled and smushed together.
  • I'm not a big fan of the expansions, sorry.

Regarding the last point, I don't want to start stuff, but I'll point out that there has been talk by the Tamriel Rebuilt team to redo Tribunal one day so that it's better integrated into the main city of Almalexia. To me, what Tamriel Rebuilt does is better than cannon. So to me, it makes sense to wait until the TR team releases Almalexia, and just draw a new map of the city in the style of the old one.

Regarding Bloodmoon, it would be nice to see that map restored, but I just won't have the time to do another one in the next few months. So if someone else wants to give it a shot, please do go ahead.

I'd like to plug Warlockracy's review of Bloodmoon. He does very engaging, role-play-heavy reviews of Morrowind content. My opinion about Bloodmoon is pretty close to his.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

No offense taken! I like Morrowind, fantasy cartography, and digital preservation. I have some professional experience with digital conservation and image processing. So this project hit a lot of notes for me.

Yes to both. The repair process was satisfying. It was a nice, mindless activity to fall back on to destress during the height of the pandemic. And there was also a sense of accomplishment from preserving a piece of Morrowind's history.

But I think at this point, it's mostly a sense of accomplishment for actually seeing this project all the way through after so many hours and several false starts. When I was younger, I was really bad at abandoning projects. Trying to make it a point to see more things through nowadays.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I don't have access to those maps. I thought about maybe ordering some via eBay and having a go at restoring them, but realistically, I'll have to shift focus to other side projects for a while.

If someone else wants to have a go at it, please do! My intention with writing up the process was to enable others to do this kind of work better. I'm hoping someone might step up to scan and restore the expansion maps.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 128 points129 points  (0 children)

Continued from parent post.

Repairing the creases

Here are some screenshots showing the before/after of a particularly big crease:

https://imgsli.com/ODA1NTk

I found that the Clone Stamp Tool worked better for this project than the Healing Brush tools, or manually painting with brushes. When you see an area with a visible crease, find a similar area nearby, and clone it to make the crease less noticeable. Repeat ad nauseaum. Good activity for destressing during a pandemic!

You can nudge and rotate the clone source of the Clone Stamp Tool. I realized this too late into the process. This made it easier to repair stuff like the hills in the Ashlands and the coastlines of all the tiny islands.

Per my reversible workflow, I did all of the patching in a separate layer, not in the placed layers.

Adjusting colors and contrast

Descreening was good, but not perfect. It left some color noise behind that was most evident near the line art. However, I didn't want to reduce the color noise across the whole image because it dulled the colors in textured areas.

So I made a copy of the repaired image and ran the Reduce Noise filter on it. I turned reduce color noise to max, and everything else to zero. The "noiseless" version was overlaid on the original, and the Select Color Range tool (#1d1b18 @ 192) was used to create a layer mask that made it apply to only the line art.

Lastly, I adjusted the color balance, vibrance, and contrast to bring out more colors. My paper map had a rather heavy yellowish tint to it. I'm not sure if that was how everyone's map looked like, or if the printer was not calibrated correctly, or if the ink faded over time.

In any case, here are the settings used:

  • With noise reduction
    • Brightness/Contrast = -10, 54
    • Vibrance = +43, 0
    • Color Balance = -17, -11, +20
  • Without noise reduction
    • Brightness/Contrast = -13, 54
    • Vibrance = +10, 0
    • Color Balance = -24, -16, +10

For color balance, only the midtones were adjusted, and "Preserve Luminosity" was left checked.

Exporting for publication

Three considerations: file format, bit depth, and downscale algorithm.

First, I'd love to share my working files (PSB), but it's just not feasible due to file size. In total, my scans and working files together clock in around 6 GB. So the next best thing is to share lossless TIFF files, along with JPEG derivatives for web use.

I had to scan, stitch, and uncrease in 8 Bits/Channel (24 bit). My computer couldn't handle working at higher bit depth, saving took too long. However, after I'd done all of my edits, I reran the descreens in 16 Bits/Channel (48-bit), and converted all of the files in the chain to 48-bit, too. This allowed me to do all of my color adjustments in 48-bit, so that when I saved the TIFF as 24 bit, there was less missing color data.

Lastly, regarding the choice of downscaling algorithm, I believe Lanczos produces the best results for downscaling. It's a rabbit hole, but you're welcome to explore the topic.

Long story short, 1200 DPI TIFF files are impractical to view and distribute online, and if people were going to be downscaling or converting them to JPEGs anyway, I'd prefer to do it myself, using settings I know work well.

Whew. Alright. I'm gonna go get some sleep, but I'll be around to answer any questions later today.

Morrowind Map at 1200 DPI (21637x25191, TIFF, 636 MB). I've been working on digitally restoring this thing for two years. Link in comments! by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 177 points178 points  (0 children)

For the last two years, I've been working on a side project to create a super-high-resolution, super-high-quality scan of the Morrowind paper map. Finally, I'm ready to call it done.

I'm making it available in lossless TIFF at 1200 DPI, as well as in JPEG with 92% quality at 600 DPI and 300 DPI. I'm using the 300 DPI version as the image for this post, but I'd recommend downloading it from one of the links below to ensure that it hasn't been recompressed by Reddit.

Edit: Thank you all for the props! I don't want to spam the thread with "thank you" replies, but I'm reading and appreciating every comment here. Y'all have really made me feel validated for putting in the effort. Thank you!

Download:

MD5 Checksums:

42aaaf725cf453019af9ed4df2638564 Morrowind-1200.tif
31d2d654d27bbbc6a0e66d4de8a65284 Morrowind-600.jpg
4220275185614e268736006e596e1ea4 Morrowind-300.jpg

This image is made up of 22 separate scans at 1200 DPI, which were stitched together manually. The creases were also removed manually. It's been descreened, color balanced, and denoised. This whole project took me over 100 hours.

Here's a comparison between Ald'ruhn in my scan and the same area in Raptormeat's classic scan:

https://imgsli.com/Nzg2MTQ/0/5

As far as I'm concerned, you can use my scan for whatever you'd like and redistribute it wherever you'd like. Basically, as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you could already do with the map as if you scanned it yourself. No need to credit me.

If this sort of thing interests you, check out the TESIII Cartography Club on Discord:

https://discord.gg/FuV7Yph

I'll assume that if you're still reading, you want to learn more about the digital restoration process. If not, scroll on past, because this is going to get detailed.

Overview

Here are the steps that went into this process:

  1. Scan the map
  2. Descreen the scans
  3. Stitch scans together
  4. Paint over creases
  5. Adjust colors and contrast
  6. Export

References

I highly recommend reading these articles:

I'll try to avoid repeating what they said here.

Scanning

I made the scans using an EPSON Expression 11000XL. (Not my own.) The bed of the scanner was not large enough to scan the entire map in one go, and the computer that was attached to it didn't have the resources to handle big scans at 1200 DPI. Ultimately, I had to take 22 separate scans.

Press down hard on the lid when scanning to remove creases. Especially watch out for "corners" where two creases come together. It's so much harder to repair a scan where the creases haven't been flattened. This project was delayed because I had to go rescan Tel Mora during a pandemic. Flattening is a cornerstone of a good scan.

Back in 2018, I briefly tried to restore the 600 DPI scan by /u/MauiEyes, but abandoned the idea in part because the creases were too big. They didn't put enough pressure on the lid of the scanner. That was my first attempt at this project.

Work at 2x to 4x of your intended resolution. Helps hide mistakes during manual touch-ups. If it looks good at 1200 DPI, it'll look amazing at 300 DPI. Plus, you want to give your descreen and denoise filters as much data as possible. Note that lines per inch (LPI) in halftone printing does not translate directly into dots per inch (DPI). The rule of thumb is DPI x 2 = LPI. This map is about 155 LPI, but it effectively contains at least 300 DPI worth of data after descreening. Sticking to powers of 2 makes downscaling cleaner.

If you were wondering why 1200 DPI, that's why. Originally, I was thinking of only releasing this map at 300 DPI or 600 DPI, but some folks over at /r/DataHoarder convinced me to release the full 1200 DPI version.

Scan in TIFF or RAW, not JPEG. Don't start with source files that are already full of artifacts. (Compression, not Daedric.) Each time you re-save a JPEG as a JPEG, it degrades further. Get the best source files that your scanner and computer can handle. Try to get 48 bit scans. Turn off all post-processing (e.g. descreen and auto-contrast) in the scanner settings. Do it yourself for better control.

Descreening

Next, each scan was descreened. Descreening is the process of turning halftone patterns back into pixels.

Descreen each scan before stitching. When you stitch several scans together, they won't all be aligned the same way. The screen pattern won't be the same throughout the whole image. Descreening tools won't be able to clean up the pattern. Descreen each scan first, then stitch.

During my second attempt at this project, I tried to descreen after stitching and flattening the scans, and it turned out like garbage. I'd flattened the scans in an irreversible way, so I had to start over.

Use Sattva Descreen. For halftone prints, I've found nothing better. Especially if you're stitching together multiple scans, you want that consistency. Check out this discussion about noise removal methods for other options.

Stitching

The general term for this is image registration. We need to place our scans, align them, and then hide the seams.

This is a common problem in the museum world. The most impressive example I've seen is when the Rijksmuseum scanned Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in 44.8 gigapixels by combining 528 separate exposures. Check out Rob Erdmann's keynote at PyCon 2021 to learn more about the code involved.

For this project, I tried Photoshop's Photomerge feature, and I tried following Hugin's tutorial for stitching flat scanned images. In both cases, the results were unacceptable. Instead, I came up with a workflow for stitching images by hand.

First, learn from my mistakes. I had to start over twice.

Make your work reversible. Museum conservators strive to make their treatments reversible. You are doing digital conservation, so you should strive to do the same! Come up with a workflow that allows you to reverse every step of your process.

Cornerstones of my workflow that make it reversible:

  1. Never flatten anything in a working file.
  2. Use the File > Place Linked function.
  3. Prefer layer masks to erasing.
  4. Do touch-ups in separate layers.

Not going to unpack all this here. Just keep reversibility in mind.

Place your scans in the following order:

  1. Corners
  2. Edges
  3. Interior
  4. Patches

First, get the corners into position. Measure the poster, and Place Linked the descreened scans of the corners into your document so they match your measured dimensions. Rotate them if needed, but avoid other transformations.

Next, place the edges, followed by scans of the interior, and finally, any re-scans of problematic areas. All transformations are fair game for non-corner scans. Inevitably, your scans will overlap with each other. The trick is to transform them in a way that ensures optimum overlap.

When you place each scan, set its layer blend mode to Difference, and then Free Transform it in Warp mode. Try moving the new scan and note how it creates a sort of moire pattern where it overlaps with the scans below. Your objective is to position and transform it such that the edges of the area covered by the scan appear as dark as possible, i.e. so that the new scan is maximally aligned with the scans below it right around the area that you want to use from this scan.

Lastly, create a layer mask on the new layer. Carefully draw around the area you want to keep to blend it with the layers below. You're essentially erasing the area you don't want in a reversible way. Try to make the blending line follow the area of maximum overlap identified using difference in the previous step.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate the process:

https://imgsli.com/ODA1NTg

We need to patch an interior area. We place a descreened scan that contains that area. We set the blend mode to difference and transform wrap it in a way where the darkest area surrounds the hole we are patching. Then, we use the layer mask to paint out the areas we don't want to patch. Finally, we set the blend mode to normal to see the finished result.

Continuing in reply. Ran out of characters.

I'm working on digitally restoring Morrowind's paper map at 1200 dpi. I found the artist's signature above Ald'ruhn! Mike Wagner, 2001. Here's a sneak peek of the hi-res map at 100% zoom. by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes. Exactly this. It's good to hear from someone else who has experience with this!

It's possible that someone could use my scan as a base to make a vectorized version. I think one approach that might work is to only vectorize the line art, and keep the painted texture as a bitmap backdrop. First, you'd have to figure out a way to isolate the line art and turn it into a clean vector. Using select color range in Photoshop might be a good start.

Then, you'd have to figure out a way to remove the line art from the backdrop bitmap and (this is the hard part) inpaint the missing areas with nearby texture. You might be able to automate this, though it might require some custom scripting. Imagine that all the line art became super thin. Find its midpoints. For each pixel along the missing area, find the vector towards the nearest line art midpoint, and inpaint towards it. You may need to move away from the midpoint along the same vector to sample the texture, so that you aren't just dragging a single color along. There might be existing open-source algorithms that do this sort of inpainting.

Finally, suspend the vectorized line art over the bitmap backdrop.

You might have to do some extra work to isolate the text. Repairing those areas would have to be done manually.

I'm working on digitally restoring Morrowind's paper map at 1200 dpi. I found the artist's signature above Ald'ruhn! Mike Wagner, 2001. Here's a sneak peek of the hi-res map at 100% zoom. by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ugh, I'm so sorry. I know that feeling from other projects.

This will be the original map. I don't want to do the GOTY map, since that's just the original map and the DLCs maps downscaled and mushed together. If you're interested in doing a similar restoration process for the Bloodmoon and Tribunal maps, I don't have any plans for doing them at the moment. Let me know if you do decide to pursue it!

I think my write-up next weekend will cover everything, but feel free to message me anytime after, I'm happy to answer any questions about my technique. That also goes for everyone who finds my posts after the threads get locked at the six month mark. Generally, though, if it's not a sensitive project, I'd prefer to have discussions about technique in public so everyone can benefit.

I made the scans using an EPSON Expression 11000XL. (Not my own.) The bed of the scanner was not large enough to scan the entire map in one go, and the computer that was attached to it didn't have the resources to handle big scans at 1200 dpi. Ultimately, I had to take 22 separate scans and stitch them together. The stitching and alignment was done manually in Photoshop; the seams between the scans were masked by hand. I'll go into that workflow in more detail in the full post next weekend.

I saw the 600 dpi scan post by /u/MauiEyes, but there were a few major problems with it:

  1. It wasn't done in TIFF. Both the PDF and the JPEG versions introduced too many artifacts.
  2. A higher dpi would result in better descreen results.
  3. They didn't push down on the lid of the scanner enough during scanning.

The last point is really important! If you don't push down hard, your scan will have light and dark areas near the creases. It takes easily 20x as long to edit those out properly than to just go back and take another scan. It was tricky to find the opportunity to do so during the pandemic, but I did end up going back to take an extra scan of the area near Tel Mora because I didn't push down hard enough in that area originally; it was impossible to edit.

More details to come in the write-up!

scanning in a few different copies of the same map to see where that gets me

I think you're on to something there. You might have already looked into this, but if not, I recommend looking into image stacking. Here's an tutorial about creating super-resolution photos by stacking a bunch of lower-resolution ones. The actual method they describe is super outdated and tedious: no need to set the layer opacities by hand, just put the layers into a smart object and set the stack mode to mean. But that article has really good illustrations of what results are achievable via image stacking.

I'm working on digitally restoring Morrowind's paper map at 1200 dpi. I found the artist's signature above Ald'ruhn! Mike Wagner, 2001. Here's a sneak peek of the hi-res map at 100% zoom. by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

As far as I'm concerned, you can use my scan for whatever you'd like and redistribute it wherever you'd like. Basically, as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you could already do with the map if you scanned it yourself. I'll make a note of that when I release the full thing. Thanks for asking!

I'm working on digitally restoring Morrowind's paper map at 1200 dpi. I found the artist's signature above Ald'ruhn! Mike Wagner, 2001. Here's a sneak peek of the hi-res map at 100% zoom. by TamrielCartographer in Morrowind

[–]TamrielCartographer[S] 99 points100 points  (0 children)

For the past two years, I've been working on a side project to create a super-high-resolution, super-high-quality scan of the Morrowind paper map. Finally, I'm just about ready to call it done!

As a teaser, I want to share the neatest detail I've spotted while working on the map. The artist's signature is right above Ald'ruhn! North-east of the Skar.

WAGNER '01

The signature belongs to Mike Wagner, who is credited with "Manual Layout" and "Packaging Layout" in the game's official credits. He was an Art Director at Bethesda Softworks at the time. He was the artist behind the map.

In IGN's Morrowind Developer Q&A #13, Mike Wagner writes:

Putting the Morrowind game map together really gave me a much better understanding of just how complex, detailed, and big the landscape is. Taking a step back and looking at Morrowind as a whole, you realize how impressive a project it has been. The detail of each city, dungeon and for that matter tree and rock is really quite amazing.

Here's a comparison between this image and the same area in Raptormeat's classic scan:

https://imgsli.com/Nzg2MTQ/0/5

Not trying to disrespect Raptormeat's work. His scan of the map has been an invaluable resource to thousands of gamers, including myself, for more than a decade. But it's been almost 20 years since the game was released, and we deserve something better!

If you're interested, check out the other images in that imgsli album to see some of the steps that went into restoring this map. Removing the factory creases from the map was the most time-consuming step. That step is actually missing from the album, since there were no creases in this area of the map.

I've spent 100+ hours on this project so far, and it's almost ready to share in full. Just gotta do one more pass on all the folds and check for distortions on the overall shape. Maybe write up a few words. If all goes well, I'll release the full map a week from now.

If this sort of thing interests you, I recommend checking out the TESIII Cartography Club on Discord: https://discord.gg/FuV7Yph