Byrne is a long-time comic book writer and artist working for DC and Marvel on Superman, Captain America and X-Men respectively.
In that world, he has detractors and fans because of core changes he did to some characters' storylines and their backgrounds.
For NEW VISIONS, however, he is extremely loyal to TOS and the classic format. Reading a NEW VISIONS story is liking watching a brand-new "episode" of TOS. He has "revisited" some characters and events from TOS but placed them in a whole new storyline that does flow nicely. It's just fun to see the images of the classic cast "acting" in new stories!
Byrne started with screenshots from numerous sources, but mainly from TrekCore.com. Now some thirteen issues in, his mastery of photo-manipulation and library of shots is pretty clean compared to the earlier issues (in the trade editions, those minor snags were cleaned up). In addition, he using software (Strata, I believe) to create clean TOS backgrounds of the bridge, corridors, engineering, transporter room, etc., to place the manipulated actor images into, retaining the "grain" look inherent from the series' images themselves. Some shots of the Enterprise were from the original visual effects shots, some from the '06 remastered images, for example.
Overall, I'm a fan ... it's just like having TOS back again. With new adventures!.