Blumpkin's Cover Bounty Board - CLOSED

[tylerbgood]

The built in scanner tools did a better version of reducing the moire, but the IJ Scan utility seems to have done a better job at retaining the original colors at the cost of the whites washing out some of the detail in the brighter areas. It's a bit of a judgement call, but I personally think the built in tool did a better job overall, since the minor color difference can be corrected digitally in Photoshop.

One other word of advice, if you aren't doing it already, use a book or two to weigh down the cover when you scan it. It will help flatten the image (and the spine in particular) and eliminate the "flash" you can see reflecting in the IJ scan.

And most of all, thank you so much for making scans!

[ignition365]

Stretch Panic just came in... I know that one is becoming a hard to find game, so I'll make sure to scan that one soon.

I'll try to do the book thing, but my scanner may not like that.

The IJ Scan has these options


The scanner itself has "Reduce show-thru", "descreen", and "unsharp mask".

How do people feel about Auto Document Feeders?  I'm putting the cover art of a dupe of mine through the ADF and it looks good, but I could see that a moving scan might possibly turn inconsistent.

lol I found the advanced settings for IJ Scan and now I'm scanning at 1200 dpi and found the "descreen" option.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8OubzPHUnrUWnRzYWE5VkJ3enM

So here is Chaos Legion scanned with the IJ Scan with descreen at 1200 dpi.  I didn't edit the scan at all for this one, so you can even see the book I used to flatten the cover art.

[tylerbgood]

1200dpi might be a little too large. I think 600dpi is probably the sweet spot. I couldn't open it with Photo Viewer but Photoshop handled it all right.

I made a comparison image of the 3 different scans you've made so that it's eaiser to judge the various strengths and weaknesses of the images. I think I still prefer the version using the built in scanner tools, but hopefully some of the other resident cover artists will weigh in with their opinions as well. It's kind of a tough call!

This is just a preview image, download to see the full size.

[ignition365]

Yeah, the blacks look better using the default tools.

I'll give it another try with Puzzle de Harvest Moon later today.

I lied.  I scanned it now.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8OubzPHUnrUWDJZU3B0bzdZUDg

Stretch Panic soon.

[tylerbgood]

I cleaned and cropped Chaos Legion and Harvest Moon. Bounty of course goes to ignition365 for providing the raw scans!

Chaos Legion



Puzzle de Harvest Moon

[ignition365]

The scanner is just giving me a difficult time with Stretch Panic.  No matter what I do it cuts off some of it.  So I spent a good half hour trying to get this as good as I could and it still seems crooked or cut off.  If it still is no good I can try to take a scan and not try to do any correcting.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8OubzPHUnrUclFFT3RoWTd1bzg

[tylerbgood]

Don't worry about straightening or cropping covers, it's easy to do in Photoshop. Just put it on the middle of the glass and scan! At first glance it looks like you got the whole cover in the shot, maybe a little of the bottom left corner got cut off, I can't really tell without the original in front of me though.

[ignition365]

Don't worry about straightening or cropping covers, it's easy to do in Photoshop. Just put it on the middle of the glass and scan! At first glance it looks like you got the whole cover in the shot, maybe a little of the bottom left corner got cut off, I can't really tell without the original in front of me though.

That's what I've been doing.  Scanning and then throwing it in GIMP (Photoshop costs money *shrug*) and rotating/cropping.

The scanner's built in scan tries to crop the image itself so sometimes some of it isn't presented in the scan.  I don't really have any way of verifying that the cover actually is perfectly straight on all edges, it kind of seems to me that it isn't.

Here's the unedited scan

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8OubzPHUnrUZXNObWlpSXFwWlk

[tylerbgood]

There should be a way to disable the auto cropping feature, but scanning software varies so much it's hard to give any specifics on how you might go about turning it off. Honestly, you don't really even need to bother doing any adjusting in photo editing software when sharing raws, that can all be done by the cover artist when they are cleaning and making adjustments anyway.

And if you're interested, Adobe gives away Photoshop CS2 for free now. It's not as full featured as the most recent versions, but it's still a competent piece of software by any standard. Here's the link if you want to give it a go: http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/magic/creativesuite/CS2_EOL/PHSP/PhSp_CS2_English.exe

[ignition365]

There should be a way to disable the auto cropping feature, but scanning software varies so much it's hard to give any specifics on how you might go about turning it off. Honestly, you don't really even need to bother doing any adjusting in photo editing software when sharing raws, that can all be done by the cover artist when they are cleaning and making adjustments anyway.

And if you're interested, Adobe gives away Photoshop CS2 for free now. It's not as full featured as the most recent versions, but it's still a competent piece of software by any standard. Here's the link if you want to give it a go: http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/magic/creativesuite/CS2_EOL/PHSP/PhSp_CS2_English.exe

Perhaps.  Photoshop is what I'm used to from design school and occasionally work, but I've learned to use GIMP and as far as I can tell it can do just about anything PS can do if you learn how GIMP works.

Though to be fair, I haven't tried to use any of the line tools in GIMP since I switched, and I don't know how well GIMP works with Wacom tablets.

But that's good to know, I forced myself to switch to GIMP while PS was still several thousand dollars.

[ignition365]

And with this I believe I have scanned all that I have that is in your request list.

Ivy the Kiwi
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8OubzPHUnrUOVVfT203ZC02V2c

BONUS:  Hot Wheels GBA scan

Back
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8OubzPHUnrUTkx1M1JZeFVnVjA

Front
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8OubzPHUnrUUkQxNk5zOXMxbWs

[tylerbgood]

Stretch Panic cleaned and cropped. Credit and bountry goes to ignition for sharing his scans.

Stretch Panic

[tylerbgood]

Cover for Ivy the Kiwi using scans generously provided by ignition365.

Ivy the Kiwi