Restoring Mahiro Maeda's 'Outtakes From Evangelion (Vol.1)' Cover Illustration

I just spent way too much time restoring the album cover image of Outtakes From Evangelion (Vol.1).

I found a high quality copy of the illustration at musicbrainz.org which is incidentally the same file as used by apple music.

Direct archive links: Front | Back | CD

The artwork was created by Masashi Ichifuru (TGB design) and is a modified version of some concept art by Mahiro Maeda. It depicts phase 2 of the Evangelion Unit-01 pseudo-evolution. It's also called "The Radiant Giant" (光の巨人).

I wanted a version with less noise and without the text but after a few hours of searching I couldn't that. I discovered that a copy of the original was printed in the Evangelion Exhibition Catalogue (Evangelion Ten-Zuroku) which was sold at the Evangelion Exhibition in 2013.

I even found this review which includes scans of some of the illustrations but not the radiant giant sketch.

When I already had given up I stumbled across this twitter post with some more scans of the book, including the sketch of the radiant giant:

By combining the color version and the sketch and using waifu2x for denoising I was able to restore the album cover image:

And I have to say, it looks glorious.

By the way, check out this song from the album:

Bonus

I also found these high quality 2000x2000 scans of the "One Last Kiss" album covers (again only on twitter for some reason)

Note

If the links to the images ever go down and somebody wants them, I have made local copies.

Update: Super Hi-Res 7080x7080 version

For fun I also just made this super hi-res version. 600dpi for a 30x30cm poster. It's not perfect but I'm not disappointed by how it turned out.
To get a good upscale quality I used Potrace on the LAB-L/C channels and a mix of Cubic Upscaling and Median Blurs for the H channel.
You can dowload it here.