Localizing a New Year's poster of a popular game II

The project I chose is to localize a New Year’s poster of the game Tale of Immortal, or 鬼谷八荒 in Chinese. I was very interested in doing this as the game is super popular in China and I enjoy playing it as well, yet its content has not been translated to English that much.

Original Poster

After Editing

Target and Outline

My target and outline for the localization was to translate all the text to English, while maintaining the layout and keeping the identical artistic features of the poster. There was not much text to work on, but the textures and background art were quite challenging. Three major area I focused on were the red swirls on the top left, the curvy sparkling lines in the middle under the “Eve” text in the localized version, and the red stamp box to the right of the female character.

Challenges

The first challenge was to keep the flow of the swirling texture in the red area on the top left corner. Since the shape of the text and its coverage will shift around after translation, I needed to complete the whole texture to maintain its consistency. I first removed all text from the poster and just kept the background. Then, on my iPad, I extended the swirling lines following their shape, and completed the texture. I drew my additional part by hand with the “Brush” tool. Afterwards I put the text layer back and it worked out quite well.

1 - Before

1 - After

2- Before

The second and hardest challenge was to re-create the sparkling lines in the middle of the poster. Once again, I needed to complete and lengthen them due to characters changing position and shape after translation. They were hard to draw identically, since all the sparkles and dots were scattered and pixelated individually, with a unique shade and glow. I came up with my solution with the starry sky texture above the character’s head, which shares a very similar texture, color, and style with those lines. I took the pattern in that area, made it into its own block, and used the “Clone Stamp” tool with a very small pixel size to paint and add the pattern to the sparkling lines.

The third challenge was to extend the red stamp block with text on the right side of the poster. The original Chinese text was short with just two characters, yet the English translation is much lengthier, especially horizontally. To maintain the layout, I needed to extend the background block to match the new text size. I backed up the original layer and used the “Rectangular Marquee” tool to select the left section of the block, then selected “Layer via Copy” to extend the area in a new layer. Finally, I merged all the layers created here to hold the larger area, and used the “Clone Stamp” tool again to re-create the black dots and original texture of this block.

3- Before

3- After

Lesson Learned

Working with this unfamiliar poster with complicated textures to reproduce, I did go the long way around on quite a few things and learned several valuable lessons, especially when working on the sparkling lines. One part was that I actually tried to use the “Magic Wand” tool with a minimal tolerance to copy the pattern of those lines, and select Edit-Define Brush Preset to define the pattern as a new brush style. I could really see its potential but unfortunately the size was still a bit too large, and the color wasn’t the most accurate. I believe that there are certain times where there is no real shortcut command to something and patience is key, while also getting to know the method for defining a new brush style, which I will likely use again in the future. One other part came across when I was trying to raise the brightness just for the additional sparkling lines, without changing the whole picture. I found a pretty convenient method using layer mask. I first adjusted the brightness of the whole picture leading to an extra layer, then cut out the area desired with a layer mask to define the exact locations the lighting adjustment should be applied to. Through the project I definitely became more versatile with Photoshop and got to explore some more functionalities.

In addition to the background textures, I also spent a large amount of time selecting the appropriate font for the translated text, to match the style of the original Chinese text. I ended up picking a font from another East Asian language. Since it was not going to be identical, I made some more adjustments by adding two or three features amongst “Gradient Overlay”, “Outer Glow”, and “Drop Shadow” to each piece of text. The end product was decent and the text style matched well.

Overall, I enjoyed working on this project and getting to localize a poster for Tale of Immortal. It felt nice to be able to apply what I learnt to a game I love. I also gained a lot more practical experience along the way and started to dive deeper into all the possible tools and options within Photoshop. Hope you liked my localized poster!