HQ AI-Enhanced card pictures for Forge

by **necxelos** » 30 May 2022, 17:58

It took a long time to get there (month of work for first release, nearing two months now) but HQ AI-Enhanced card pictures for Forge are here for everyone to enjoy.

What did I do exactly? I remastered Scryfall (XLHQ) scans for use in Forge, using Neural Networks, Python scripts and a huge chunk of my GPU lifespan. Result is a gorgeous package of smooth, sharp, video-game-quality images that are pleasure to look at and play with.

[IMPORTANT UPDATE - READ CAREFULLY] All of Archenemy, Arsenal, Box, Commander, Core & Expansion Draft Innovation, Duel Deck, From the Vault, Funny, Masterpiece, Masters, Memorabilia, Planechase, Premium Deck, Spellbook, Starter, Vanguard sets are now done. There are also numerous fixes to previously released sets (details and information on which sets to redownload is in post from 22 Jun 2022, 01:37 below). There is also a new primary download link for all the sets (at the bottom of this post).

[UPDATE 2022-06-27] A whopping 223 sets worth of promo sets has been added. For ease of use I created two new directories with sets from this update alone: Sets in Forge - Added 2022-06-27/ and Sets NOT YET in Forge - Added 2022-06-27/. You should also download set Q06 from Sets in Forge, it was placed in wrong directory before. Card examples can be found in post from 27 Jun 2022, 18:59 on page 3 of this topic.

[UPDATE 2022-07-02] Just 9 sets this time, but a lot of "firsts" there. All new sets (Innistrad Double Feature, Streets of New Capenna + Commander, Commander Legends Battle for Baldurs Gate, Double Masters) upscaled to gorgeous level, ugly MTGO sets that aren't going any better than that and first MTGA set. Everything is under download link (bottom of this post) inside Sets in Forge - Added 2022-07-02 directory. Card examples can be found in post from 02 Jul 2022, 01:04 on page 3 of this topic.

[UPDATE 2022-07-07] Big update once again, one focused on MTGA-exclusive cards. It contains all of the rebalanced cards, all Alchemy Sets, All Historic Anthologies Sets and Jumpstart Historic Horizons. Card examples can be found in post from 08 Jul 2022, 01:37 on page 3 of this topic. IMPORTANT: read instructions in the mentioned post!!!

[UPDATE 2022-07-23] First part of the tokens update, consisting of 826 tokens, updated AFR & NEO sets and SLX set are now added. Card examples can be found in post from 23 Jul 2022, 02:57 on page 4 of this topic.

"Archive of Updates" | Open: [UPDATE] Commander sets are now done, comparison images are in the post from 02 Jun 2022, 21:04 below.
[UPDATE] Archenemy, Arsenal, Planechase and Vanguard sets are now done, comparison images are in the post from 04 Jun 2022, 17:26 below.
[UPDATE] Duel Deck, From the Vault, Masterpiece, Premium Deck and Spellbook sets are now done, comparison images are in the post from 06 Jun 2022, 22:21 below.
[UPDATE] Draft Innovation sets are now done, comparison images are in the post from 08 Jun 2022, 15:56 below.
[UPDATE] Masters and Starter sets are now done, comparison images are in the post from 11 Jun 2022, 23:56 below.
[UPDATE] Box and Funny sets are now done, comparison images are in the post from 16 Jun 2022, 16:20 below. Other types of sets are WIP...

Example images:

"Animate Wall" | Open

"Bellowing Aegisaur" | Open

"Banewasp Affliction" | Open

"Carnophage" | Open

"Daring Apprentice" | Open

"Dissipation Field" | Open

"Amphibious Kavu" | Open

"Nissa, Voice of Zendikar" | Open

"Epiphany Storm" | Open

"Grim Lavamancer" | Open

"Ajani's Aid" | Open

"Vorel of the Hull Clade" | Open

"Emrakul, the Aeons Torn" | Open

"Silverskin Armor" | Open

"Island" | Open

"Plains" | Open

Image comparison (remastered to the left vs scans to the right):

"Teyo, the Shieldmage" | Open

"Persistent Specimen" | Open

"Contact Other Plane" | Open

"Stinging Shot" | Open

"Stormscale Anarch" | Open

"Autochthon Wurm" | Open

"Mindslaver" | Open

"Forest" | Open

As of 22/06/2022 all types of sets, except for Cube, Promo, Tokens and Treasure Chest are done!

You can download all, currently done, sets here:
http://download.austeregrim.net/xlhq_remaster/

"Old download links - NOT UPDATED / NOT WORKING for now!" | Open: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/7urmn5uli6m2x/Archenemy_Sets - Archenemy
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/kvi5au ... senal_Sets - Arsenal
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/9q7c6h2jybfhu/Box_Sets - Box
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/atyx5x ... ander_Sets - Commander
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ihgs96 ... nsion_Sets - Core & Expansion
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/try7mk ... ation_Sets - Draft Innovation
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/dilep8 ... _Deck_Sets - Duel Deck
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/jafy74 ... Vault_Sets - From the Vault
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/xrwu3k ... Funny_Sets - Funny
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/rayjr1 ... piece_Sets - Masterpiece
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/iah7q9 ... sters_Sets - Masters
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/qfyb21 ... chase_Sets - Planechase
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/hxphmn ... _Deck_Sets - Premium Deck
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/udei0e ... lbook_Sets - Spellbook
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/eo1p4m ... arter_Sets - Starter
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/bxit23 ... guard_Sets - Vanguard

Enjoy

by **Arcanist** » 31 May 2022, 18:39

necxelos wrote:It took a month out of my life, but it's finally done!

I remastered Scryfall (XLHQ) scans for use in Forge, using Neural Networks, Python scripts and a huge chunk of my GPU lifespan.

Currently all Core and all Expansion sets are done (out of those who had PNG scans available in the first place). As it stands now, weight is roughly 2.5 times that of Kev's SuperLQ's. Tested on Desktop and Android.

I will be tackling other types of sets soon (probably start with Commander and other "game modes" like Vanguard or Archenemy), will update this post accordingly.

Thanks! I am curious to learn what you mean by "remaster". What is the difference between this version and what can be found on Scryfall for instance? Would you mind sharing more details about your release? As a side note, I never realized PNG images were available on Scryfall. Thanks for letting me know!

by **AStrangerIsHere** » 01 Jun 2022, 10:34

Thank you! It's nice to finally see and appreciate all those cards without any artifacts.

by **Huggybaby** » 01 Jun 2022, 13:50

These look fantastic, thank you.

by **Heris** » 01 Jun 2022, 14:20

Hi necxelos,

thank you for your work. The scans are very good and I can't wait for further MTG sets.

Best regards

by **necxelos** » 01 Jun 2022, 19:23

Arcanist wrote:Thanks! I am curious to learn what you mean by "remaster". What is the difference between this version and what can be found on Scryfall for instance? Would you mind sharing more details about your release? As a side note, I never realized PNG images were available on Scryfall. Thanks for letting me know!

In the spirit of "one picture is worth a thousand words" I added comparison images to the OP. Watch in fullscreen (desktop) or only left half of the image shows up - something with the way forum works with low resolutions.

And yes, Scryfall has the PNG's from XLHQ Project. In fact it's the only place where one can get those nowadays...

by **necxelos** » 01 Jun 2022, 19:27

AStrangerIsHere wrote:Thank you! It's nice to finally see and appreciate all those cards without any artifacts.

Wouldn't go as far as "without any artifacts". My procedure is, sadly, very sensitive to scan quality. Some images end up with visible "lines" where paint dots from print were before. On the positive note, it's only a very small fraction of images (I'd say 80% perfectly smooth, 15% small/ignorable amount of lines, 5% lots of lines). Still million times better than just using scans though

by **Arcanist** » 01 Jun 2022, 19:35

necxelos wrote:In the spirit of "one picture is worth a thousand words" I added comparison images to the OP. Watch in fullscreen (desktop) or only left half of the image shows up - something with the way forum works with low resolutions.

Thanks. I ended up checking some of the sets out after posting my message. I should have edited it, but it was late and I was tired. Is it just me or do the cards look a bit more "cartoony"? Not saying it is a bad thing. The result looks really clean overall. The process seems to work much better on recent sets however. I had a quick look at Limited Alpha and a good number of the cards look really weird there.

by **Huggybaby** » 02 Jun 2022, 00:01

I'll add some info here, just in case it might be helpful. If you know this stuff pls don't be insulted. :-)

You can right click the image then open in a new tab and you will be able to see everything full size.

The original artwork has to be halftoned for printing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone

When I started the HQ Pics project we had several goals but two are that we wanted to document history, and we wanted to enhance our gameplaying experience. At the time you mostly had to play with no pics, and that sucked. If you were there you'll know the reason was because of copyright threats and FUD.

I said eff that, and we changed the game, period. You accomplish nothing being chickenshit. I might release a history on that one day.

Back to the two goals I'm discussing.
1) Documenting print characteristics of each set (verisimilitude). Generally, one set might be darker or fuzzier than average, and that would show in our release. Our processing guy was excellent, and sensitive to the matter.

However, when I made the .tiny pics, verisimilitude was not a consideration for me, so I processed all the pics in a batch using the auto adjust feature in Irfanview. After processing, those pics came out looking like they were from the same set, and the saturation was higher. They looked fantastic at small sizes. Those ended up being used on phones for a while.

2) Usability in computer games. To this end we had an upper limit on the file size of each pic, and of course we used jpg, so data was lost. Also, the halftones were removed, through unsharp masking IIRC. Halftones are a necessity when printing on paper but not for viewing on a PC. It's possible that with a halftoned image you could print a better counterfeit too, but that's not why they were removed, it was because they looked better on screen.

Eventually I asked the team to save the original scans, and that became XLHQ. XLHQs would have the halftone in place and no processing. We didn't save those for a long time because the files were HUGE, and we didn't have multiple hard drives to throw at a volunteer project. I anticipated that storage would become cheaper. I also anticipated that monitors would become much larger, and the thought of viewing a card that had not been downrezzed on a large monitor was a pleasant one. I also anticipated that the XLHQs would prove useful in as yet unknown contexts, and that has proven to be true. AI image processing had not been invented yet, and there hadn't been a commercial enterprise to use them either, but that has changed.

I don't know if item 1) is a factor for the current team. I have no idea who they are. I suspect the cartoony look you're talking about is due to halftone removal, and some aspect of the AI enhancement. necxelos will have to address that, but the colors and sharpness look good to me!

Finally, I wonder how many people care about item 1)? Because if verisimilitude is not a consideration during processing, then history is lost. Someone wishing to record that history would have to start from scratch, redoing every card. The odds of that happening are very, very small.

PS I just looked at the AL set. It's unrealistic because it looks too good. =D>

I'll tell you what I look for in a processed card too. The first thing I look at is the clarity of the copyright symbol. These are top notch. I look at the amount of sharpening. There is a balance there, too much and you get the "shadows" or "ringing" around edges, even when zoomed out. Sharpening is mandatory I think, otherwise the pic looks fuzzy, and you will always see sharpening artifacts when zoomed in, so that must be considered. These pics have a good balance of sharpness. Finally I look at horizontal lines. We have had releases where that was a problem and you would get bumps along the line. It might be from scanning when the card is not aligned perfectly and it wasn't quite fixable. The lines in these pics looks good.

I did see some other strange artifacts zoomed in, and necxelos is aware of it. It's always a tradeoff between processing time and quality. Ultimately if an artifact is not noticeable at playing resolution then you have satisfied the majority.

<edit> I think I'm misremembering about the XLHQs. Our scans were gigantic and unprocessed, dust and all.

by **necxelos** » 02 Jun 2022, 20:04

Here's first update to pictures, all Commander sets are now processed and ready to use.

Image comparison (remastered to the left vs scans to the right):

"Swords to Plowshares" | Open

"Banshee of the Dread Choir" | Open

"Chemister's Insight" | Open

"Essence Warden" | Open

"Faithless Looting" | Open

"Havengul Lich" | Open

"Eldrazi Monument" | Open

"Azorius Guildgate" | Open

You can download sets here:
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/atyx5x ... ander_Sets

by **kevlahnota** » 04 Jun 2022, 05:25

Arcanist wrote:
necxelos wrote:In the spirit of "one picture is worth a thousand words" I added comparison images to the OP. Watch in fullscreen (desktop) or only left half of the image shows up - something with the way forum works with low resolutions.
Thanks. I ended up checking some of the sets out after posting my message. I should have edited it, but it was late and I was tired. Is it just me or do the cards look a bit more "cartoony"? Not saying it is a bad thing. The result looks really clean overall. The process seems to work much better on recent sets however. I had a quick look at Limited Alpha and a good number of the cards look really weird there.

The quality of remastered scans through AI really depends on the source. If the source is dark or really bad, it can't upscale and redraw properly and resorts to either blending the pixels to it's nearest neighbor becoming less "detailed" look. Anyway most of them are good except some few cases.

Some still looks good for example this card:

: SuperLQ upscaled vs Remastered HQ Newer Card

but some failed at guessing the nearest pixel like this one:

: SuperLQ downscaled vs Remastered HQ Older Card

by **necxelos** » 04 Jun 2022, 14:32

Huggybaby wrote:I did see some other strange artifacts zoomed in, and necxelos is aware of it. It's always a tradeoff between processing time and quality. Ultimately if an artifact is not noticeable at playing resolution then you have satisfied the majority.

My reasoning exactly.

The only thing I want to correct is that it's not a processing time tradeoff. My rig is strong enough to make it a non-issue. Problem is, with certain scans simply nothing can be done. Might be the imperfect alignment while scanning, might be the bad batch of cards (early editions were printed on complete garbage machines and quality varied greatly).

BUT

This is why I believe my remasters is only a first step to graphical superiority. There are tools now that allow recreating cards from scratch - this is my intended solution for sets/cards that end up looking the worst with AI remastering. Downside: this will be a manual work, card after card, so without serious manpower involved, it's not gonna happen anytime soon.

Arcanist wrote:Is it just me or do the cards look a bit more "cartoony"? Not saying it is a bad thing. The result looks really clean overall. The process seems to work much better on recent sets however. I had a quick look at Limited Alpha and a good number of the cards look really weird there.

There are several things going on with early editions. Let's start with the least obvious:
- Early edition artworks were absolutely terrible. Kindergarten kid level of drawings mostly. We idealize those because of our sentiment and imperfect memories. It's the same with video games, we think "oh this was a great game" than we install it and instantly regret doing so.
- Early editions were printed on cheap, crappy printers. The same card could look good or bad, depending on the day it was printed on. And people who scanned those cards simply used what they had available, nobody thought about today's graphical standards back then. It was good enough for the time.
- This extends to scanning machines being available. Early editions were scanned many years ago. Today's scanners are way better.

As for the cartoony look, not the case. I'd rather say, it all looks like digital artwork now, while originally, some of the card artworks were created in analog (brush, pencil, pastels, sometimes even engravings). The same algorithm that removes print dots also removes analog artwork imperfections such as paint brush strokes.

kevlahnota wrote:but some failed at guessing the nearest pixel like this one:

Yeah, Ancestrall Recall is one of prime candidates for complete recreation in CardConjurer at some point. Luckily there's only a couple of those.

by **necxelos** » 04 Jun 2022, 14:38

Huggybaby wrote:I said eff that, and we changed the game, period. You accomplish nothing being chickenshit. I might release a history on that one day.

Paint me interested. I'd love to read that story

Also: Respect!

by **necxelos** » 04 Jun 2022, 16:26

Here's second update to pictures, all Arsenal, Archenemy and Planechase sets are now processed and ready to use.

Image comparison (remastered to the left/top vs scans to the right/bottom):

"Your Puny Minds Cannot Fathom" | Open

"What's Yours Is Now Mine" | Open

"Orzhova" | Open

"Academy at Tolaria West" | Open

"Urza" | Open

"Hermit Druid Avatar" | Open

DISCLAIMER: PMOA part of Vanguard were not scans. Those were low quality digital cards from MTGO. They will not be on par with PVAN quality, but still ended up quite nice.

You can download sets here:
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/7urmn5 ... enemy_Sets - Archenemy
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/kvi5au ... senal_Sets - Arsenal
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/qfyb21 ... chase_Sets - Planechase
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/bxit23 ... guard_Sets - Vanguard

by **necxelos** » 06 Jun 2022, 21:21

Here's third update to pictures, all Duel Deck, From the Vault, Masterpiece, Premium Deck and Spellbook sets are now processed and ready to use.

Image comparison (remastered to the left vs scans to the right):