https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/playfield-protector-over-mylar-and-touch-up-on-a-dolly-parton-pin#post-6361537

I've seen this before, I think CPR dropped the ball on this one unfortunately

*Among a LOT of others.

Some of the issues looks like they vectorize art, and then don't go back to touch it up and make it match better, using photoshop's "trace" option.

Was that playfield digitally printed or screen printed? If it was screen printed, it's very possible that the vector artwork WAS an exact copy of the original Bally playfield artwork with its finer, crisper lines and details, and that the ink spread when printed. If these were halftones, the effect would be called "dot gain", where, for example, halftone dots that are supposed to represent a 40% tint spread during printing and now might be 50% or more, causing the shade to darken. The linework all looks the same in your sample pics, just much thicker on the reprint, so it's not like different artwork was used. Even the dots in the red on her shirt and reflections on her nails are smaller, which means the red ink spread also.

I wonder if their sample playfield that they created the artwork from had some sort of ink spread, and they just copied exactly what that looked like. My repro Sorcerer backglass (NOT from CPR but from PP) was like that. The original had much finer and intricate details, and I was kinda disappointed with the thicker black outlines and loss of detail of the reproduction. Turns out that their sample was exactly like that, and even the backglass photo on the Sorcerer flyer shows the thicker lines.

For any sort of illumination of another recent pf for comparison. There’s definitely heavier lines as a trend.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/classic-stern-cheetah-club-its-fast/page/8#post-6323720

Their sample PFs are always 100% accurate and any diff'rences are your problem. Just ask them!

Let us know the response in 2 weeks.

Outrageously bad. I'd be really pissed and return it immediately. As a graphics guy myself I think most of their work is awful. It has nothing to do with their printing process and everything to do with their art director.

Of course they'll always respond and say that the copy they were working from was EXACTLY like this. Bullshit.

My TFTC plastics have thicker line art, I think pretty much all cpr art is like that.
They always say 'all art redone by hand', I guess 'mouse-click select tool' qualifies for that.

This is soooooo true. Cue the two page grilling, degrading tone, and your just seeing things response from Kevin.

I don't have Photoshop, but in GIMP (if anyone is curious), this result is achieved through "filters>artistic>cartoon."

I could see the effect being an improvement at times, but I agree it's overdone on this Dolly.

I haven't gotten a playfield from them yet, but I've been happy with all of the CPR backglasses I've gotten (despite the subjective Pinside debates on them).

In defense of CPR, I've had my issues.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cpr-playfield-preorders-are-meaningless

However, they have always made things right with me. Kevin stepped up in that situation. Mike made another issue whole I had. They are very slow to answer emails however. But I would give them the time to correct this before grabbing pitch forks.

As someone who does some work in Photoshop and Illustrator, I've seen this before.
Both those have tools to help "automate" a re-drawing process, however, when the detail is relatively small, their software has problems with extrapolation, thus things just become merged together.
I've created many translites from original BG, and at first I used those "automated" tools, now, almost every line is re-drawn by hand.
Is it much more time consuming, you bet your arse, but opposed to the results posted by the OP here, the results are worth it - IMO.

So, my two cents, it looks as if this product was rushed through the digitization process.

Gotta disagree with you, if you're referring to the Adobe Illustrator's and other tracing programs. I used Adobe Streamline in the 90's and various online tracing websites later on, and currently use Illustrator's tracing feature on a daily basis. Tracing might merge some things only if they're practically abutting each other, but those extremely thin lines and dots, like the shadings in Dolly's neck for example, would likely be ignored entirely and omitted from the final vector, not thickened like that. Here's a jpeg export of a quick trace I just did of Dolly's hand & mike pic above. The linework looks like shit because the image was low-res and no cleanup done to it, but you can see the nothing was thickened, except perhaps minimally due to the messy linework. This looks nothing like the thick black lines in rockwell's CPR sample pic.

What may be possible is this, though - the original playfield scan may have had the colors knocked out of it in Photoshop, leaving a black and white only design, and then using a little blurring and contrasting, or adding a stroke to the outlines, or any of several other methods, all the edges of the black were thickened slightly to give the black a little more "bulk", and then that was vectorized. But the tracing itself wouldn't thicken anything up on its own, it would only result in very messy and uneven curved lines unless the black and white image was super-high resolution and had sharply defined edges.

cancel (resized).jpg

I have a dolly with a killer playfield but obviously not new and was considering buying theirs for two weeks im glad I found this
I think CPR is great for replacing trashed playfields but won’t go for this to get something perfect

That does suck man I love my Dolly

I gotta ask … if it’s killer why change it?

I’d much rather have a mint original PF.

The only reason I ever buy a new PF is if my game is completely trashed.

In saying that - my Dolly PF is average, I’ll buy any “killer” used playfields!

rd

The only thing that’s not nice on it is the inserts are slightly cupped you can feel it
I was considering replacement because of that

Maybe that makes mine average ha ha I wouldn’t know
Most I’ve seen,in person were pretty rough
Other then that all artwork there and in fantastic shape

Send it my way!

I have a depot in CA.

rd

Ha ha I guess that answers my concerns
I just legit like to play this game and having it around

Find some local guy that does clear-coating. They can fill in the cupping inserts and clear the entire playfield. If that's all that's wrong with your playfield! If you prefer the CPR over what you have then sale the used one to offset the cost of the CPR.

boy that looks like ass. I mean at least something is available, I guess, but that's a far cry from the original.