any tips on reconstructing panels generally? especially if there are obscured or downscaled parts
The release of the offline Unofficial Homestuck Collection was a godsend for the general public to easily peruse the "storyfiles" folder and find what they need for rips and such. When I first got into Homestuck, it was right after the Gigapause began in 2013, and I didn't have a constant internet connection at home, so I torrented an offline copy that was then a year out of date, up to page 007326. For the longest time, that was my source for finding a bunch of images to stitch together using my computer-of-a-brain's perfect recall of what was where.
Tip #1: look for panels where something isn't obscured/downscaled.
For this post in particular, I needed to get a clean background of the sky without Andrew in it, so initially my plan was to crop just him and his arm out and find different panels with the same sky to fill in the cutout. I lucked out though and found this panel just a few pages later where he drops out of frame, giving us a perfect sky to work off of. There's slightly less color banding too, so it's probably a lot closer to the original source image than from the panel I was recreating.
This is actually the same sky image used in all of these panels, just sometimes flipped horizontally and moved up a bit. It's easy to notice when all the files are laid out like this in a folder.
There's also the possibility that what you're looking for is isolated on its own in one of the flashes. Just try really hard to remember if a character or whatever ever moved behind or in front of something in one of them. For example, you can find 1:1 scale images of some stuff in Dave's corner kitchen from [S] Dave: Ascend to the highest point of the building. I made a really shitty sort of crash course on how you can rip them from flashes.
Granted, Hussie usually dithered and color-reduced the hell out of these images when exporting them as static GIFs to use in Flash. You may have to find some panels where they're a bit "cleaner" and use the flash rip as a template to crop them out, depending on how much of a perfectionist you are.
Tip #2: if you can't find anything, redraw it yourself.
It's a little frustrating, but sometimes there's just no helping it. You'll have to... *gulp* d-d-d-d-draw......... 😨. Well, tracing and editing, more like.
Once upon a time, I needed the other side of John's living room, but the only full shot of it in-comic was downscaled, so I gathered every panel that took place in that room and used the 1:1 images as reference to scale up the downsampled ones.
Fortunately, a lot of rooms used John's bedroom as the base template, just flipped horizontally and bisected diagonally to extend the length. The epitome of "you can copy my homework, just don't make it obvious." I had already ripped a perfect base room from [S] YOU THERE. BOY. and [S] John: Examine your dad's room., so remaking the living room itself was a cinch. I had my work cut out for me with the couch and fireplace, though.
I carefully traced over the upscaled downsampled couch using a rip of the front-facing version as reference for the line weight. I got some nitpicks with the armrest area now years later, but the whole thing's basically just an outlined silhouette with no fine details, it's hard to mess that up.
I ripped the fireplace from the act 2 walkaround flash as well and edited out the fire pokers, urn, and Nanna's portrait from it. It seemed to me he simply edited the bottom part to make the backside, so that's what I did.
In retrospect, this all wasn't very difficult to do. I guess it only felt tedious because of all the hunting for references and rips.
But you don't have the go the extra mile for everything if it isn't worth the effort. I gave up partway trying to trace over and clean up a small downscaled rip of Dadbert's car since I realized it literally would never be seen at full scale in my fan adventure anyway.
The full res back half was ripped from this flash. The low res front half was ripped from this flash and scaled up using the back half as reference for the size. Could you tell at a glance?
Now, recreating part of a manipulated image can be tricky. I wanted to edit out the cruxtruder lid on top of the ship steering wheel table. I remember trying to search up the original image but could not for the life of me. At my wit's end, I figured maybe Hussie composited it for whatever reason (he probably didn't, why bother?), so I looked for the closest matching ship's wheel and edited it as close as I could to the in-comic one, only using it to fill in the obscured parts behind.
Good enough! No one will be any the wiser.
So that's tip #3: uhhh... fake it 'til you make it. :)