Hokusai Manga - digital restoration and book design

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HOKUSAI MANGA

Published by Satori Ediciones (Spain, November 2023)

Book cover design, book inside layout and digital restoration of 868 old plates (upon museum photographs of the original edition from the early 1800s)

For the first time since its original edition (19th century), the 15 volumes of the magnum opus of Hokusai, the greatest Japanese artist of all time, are published in an unabridged and fully commented edition. Hokusai Manga is considered the artistic precedent of the contemporary japanese manga genre.

Over more than eleven hundred pages in two volumes, this new edition returns the splendor and freshness to the more than 4,000 original illustrations that make up the complete work through a complex digital restoration process developed specifically by Juan Hernaz for this project.

The final images have been restored from the photographs of the original edition deposited in the Museum of Zaragoza (Spain), with the aim of offering the most reliable edition of the work of the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai published in the last 150 years.

Digital restoration process

Comparatives: from original photos to final artworks

The digital restoration process is structured over between 5 and 8 phases in each illustration plate, that include the elimination of paper grain, the recovery and enhancement of midtones and composite tones from the original two direct inks, the recovery of black ink depth, analysis of color channels, infrared processing, several progressive focus passes, contrast and color curves analysis, cleaning of impurities and other marks originated by the pass of time, uniformization of tones and final processing of CMYK color channels independently.

The full process requires the combination of these phases in different degrees according to the special and individual characteristics of each one of the 868 plates, with the aim of recovering the original color without damaging the old flavor of the illustrations.