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I came across this article about how the 1996 colour facsimile of The Black Island received a colour correction treatment that made it more accurate to Hergé's original drawings than the actual 1943 book

Broken link removed - page no longer available.

My question is, did the later colour facsimile albums recieve this treatment too, or it was an exclusive experiment for The Black Island only?

I think the answer is going to be that we don't know for certain - Black Island is the only one for which they have published details.

I could surmise that as the text has certainly been digitised, that the art will undergo a similar process. Perhaps if you wanted evidence, the thing would be to look for the types of problems that there were in Black Island in any of the other books, and compare them against current editions to see if they have gone.

It may be that it depends on what assets the archives hold - if they have complete line (black and white) art and the colour pages prepared for the reproduction department by the studio's colourists, then they could be using those for other books; it may have been for Black Island that they had to make do with second-generation or later, and repair those.

The Casterman website has some comments by Etienne Pollet, who was in charge of overseeing the Tintin books at the time, and he mentions some of the changes made, including colour corrections. (You would need to be able to read French, or use a page translator). The colour facsimiles page is here.

The Black Island was the first of the facsimiles to be produced so Casterman needed to do some experiments first to try to replicate, and in some cases, improve the colour. All necessary because of the changes in the type of inks used, printing process and the quality of paper. My guess is that once they'd found a technique they liked they applied it to a greater or lesser degree to all of the subsequent colour facsimiles. I also think different treatments were needed because the printing process, paper and ink changed over the years in which Hergé was working, so the books have varying colour ranges. Compare the colours in Red Rackham's Treasure with The Red Sea Sharks, for example.

Thanks for posting the link to that interesting article, Pharaoh.

The only two facsimile editions I own are the French facsmiles of The Black Island and Land of Black Gold.

Looking at the Black Gold facsimile in the light of the article, I'd say that it had almost certainly been done the same way - ie: digitally correcting the effects of paper warps and age blemishes on the coloured-up blue-boards before adding the black-line plate. Certainly, the "colouring in" matches the black line exactly on every plate - much more so than I imagine would have been the case even in the original late 1940s edition, from what the article says.

The colour to black-line alignment in both facsimiles is even sharper than in my "modern" Tintin books from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, where there often seems to be at least one page in any book where the black line is slightly off-register with the underlying colour plate (though that was probably due to printing press reasons, rather than the sort of problems with the blue-board paper described in the article).

These Casterman facsimiles seem to be giving us versions of the Tintin books that actually have better colour reproduction and printing than what could have been at the time. I'm sure that Hergé would have approved of this, though it does slightly stretch the meaning of the term "facsimile".

But not as much as the definition of facsimile has been stretched by the recently published English-translated "facsimiles" of these early colour books. In these, the term facsimile seems to mean the books Hergé would have produced in the 1940s had he acquired a British publisher two decades before he actually did, and also a time machine in order to utilise 21st Century digital lettering and late 20th century editorial alterations!

Still, Hergé wasn't exactly a purist about things like chronological logic or preservation of the original when updating his own work, so it doesn't really bother me.

Generally, I think these Casterman facsimiles (at least the two I own) show what high production standards can be achieved by sensitively using modern digital technology to get the best results out of the use of original colour and black-line plates, and by doing a nice print job on good thick paper. I just wish Casterman and Egmont (the current UK publisher) would apply the same high production values and artistic sensitivity to their modern mainstream editions of the Tintin books.

But that's for another thread!