Are you certain these thumbs were posted (I presume as a teaser on a supporter page?) as open image files with multiple layers active and accessible (unlikely if the dev was even a little protective of his IP being stolen), or were they posted as flattened screenshot images (feels more likely) of the gallery as it
looked in his developmental version of the game?
It is impossible to know from you post attachments because F95 converts all uploaded images to flattened, low quality avif format now, so that is all that we can see if we view or DL your attachments.
If the first then it
might be possible to remove the lock image with PS or other decent image editing tools, but if the second then the data behind the lock pixels is not being covered, it was permanently replaced (
i.e., it does not exist in those images). In many games where I have extracted the CG it isn't a case of a layer that gets removed, it's a case where there are 2 full sets of thumbnails - one with the lock permanently burned over the image and another of the unaltered images, and unlocking any of those scenes/images just swaps the lock version of the thumb out and replaces it with the other one. So at least in
those games it isn't an active layer that is disabled/removed when you unlock a scene, just a completely different image. But again, we would need the gallery to be in a
released version to have the unaltered thumbs in the rpa file(s).
