JudasIscariot: Hi.
Just wanted to chime in and say thank you for the nice tables :D. I did switch the creature tables for HoMM III as another member submitted their own scans, but I don't recall doing anything with the HoMM II ones. I do my best to give credit where credit is due and ask those who put content up for permission but perhaps the HoMM 2 tables were put up before my time?
Again, I apologize for the snagging without due credit.
To JudasIscariot or any other GoG staff reading this, I gotta say these old scans look a bit faded compared to real life photos so I guessing Sandro's scanner was suffering some light bleed, they're also a bit blury/low res, and there's a fair bit of wear and tear on them too, but hey it's better than nothing lol! However after seeing this thread a while back I decided to try and find my own second hand copy to scan for everyone. :)
Well now I'm pleased to say that I successfully scored a physical copy of Heroes 3 Armageddon's Blade peripherals off ebay which included the elusive official HoMM3 AB creature card in good condition!
I took it into my work as we've got a big A3 scanner there that's better at stopping light bleed-in, is sharper regardless of DPI settings and seems to pick up colours better than home scanners. I successfully scanned each page and then painstakingly rotated, stitched together, and cleaned them up as best of possible in Paint Shop Pro and converted to pdf (That's about 7MB in size). The reason I went the pdf route was because using my adobe acrobat PDF suite at work I was able to apply some special image compression not normally available to me with my various paint programs that resulted in the visual lossless quality of a PNG but not the 50MB file size, and the tiny file size of a JPG but none of the yucky visual lossy compression artefacts you get with them. I've also 7zipped the original giant PNG files I fed into the PDF and uploaded them that archive org page too, should anyone still want them.
Here's the archive org page I've setup that includes a nice built in page reader and multiple download options:
https://archive.org/details/homm-3-ab-creature-card As you can see by this screenshot from the pdf, my scans have much nicer colours (eg look at that lovely orange), sharper text and far less physical damage compared to the previously posted ones! Really the only letdown is that despite my best efforts to push down on the scanner and flatten the booklet there's still some bending on some of the edges sorry!
https://i.imgur.com/xSKgLjJ.png .
