Hello everyone,
I'm a new member here. I recently discovered this community and am very interested in helping increase the level of quality that can be achieved when replicating covers. I have a lot of in-depth experience in a different field whose skills translate VERY well into this one. I'd like to apply those skills here and share my knowledge.
A little bit of background:
I used to make fake IDs and driver's licenses. I wasn't your run-of-the-mill FakeID vendor, however. I broke down the process of forging a document into its discreet steps and then did tons of research into each one of these steps and achieved mastery of them. Because of this, the quality of my IDs was top-notch, especially compared to the many unskilled other FakeID vendors who operated at the time. I sold them both on the darknet and locally. My primary in-person customer was the Russian mob. This led to my (and their) downfall. Though my online opsec was great, dealing with people in-person was the weak link. The FBI was investigating my clients and had their phones tapped. When one of the less-technologically-savvy members called me on the phone to ask for IDs instead of using Signal, the FBI found out about me and I became one of the co-defendants in a 33-person racketeering indictment, which they referred to as a "Russian Crime Syndicate".
I did 29 months in the feds and after I came home, I had to go legit. Fortunately, my specialty is in IT (Linux, coding, etc), so going legit isn't an issue. The thing that bothered me is that I put my heart into my ID work and had to learn a number of specialized skills specifically for replicating a document. All that effort just to then drop it completely. I definitely had some feelings over that. This is why finding this community is really awesome on a personal level. The skills used in forging IDs and licenses translate very well into what this community's about. The other upside is that it's not illegal, so I don't have to worry about going back to prison over this stuff.
I'll be going over these steps in more detail in future posts and perhaps a full-featured guide, but in the meantime let's start with a general overview of the steps that we'll have to take in order to make the best cover we can. At least this way before I have any full guide written out, other members and I can tackle various issues as they come up without having to wait for me to finish a detailed guide on the entire process.
- COLOR MANAGEMENT, PROFILING, AND CALIBRATION -Before we use any of our graphics input/output devices (scanner, monitor, printer), we need to make sure that they're properly calibrated with the right color profiles. This will allow us to reproduce colors flawlessly. No guesswork required.
Scanner: Obtain an IT8 target for profiling the scanner.
Monitor: This is optional, but it can be pretty cool. A colorimeter will allow your monitor's colors to be measured, so that your screen accurately represents the colors it's meant to display.
Printer: You can either use your own spectrophotometer or print out a color chart and use a color profiling service to make an ICC profile for you. The chart will have to be representative of your final production setup; meaning the media, ink, and printer settings (best if set to 'no color management' or the printer settings panel's equivalent) have to match up or otherwise the profile will have discrepancies.
- SCANNING -Make sure you use a decent scanner. An Epson Perfection V600 is pretty good. Cheaper ones can be used too, though. Clean the glass and ensure the input media is properly aligned. Use VueScan with in complete unfiltered RAW mode and save as .TIF without any lossy compression. I recommend a ppi of AT LEAST 1200ppi. 2400ppi and 4800ppi are good too. I usually use 2400ppi. Use the ICC profile that you created when profiling the scanner with the IT8 target. This can be done after loading the image in Photoshop.
To everyone who posts raw scans here: Please be sure to either calibrate the colors in your scan or include information with your scan that can be used to calibrate the colors later on.
I wrote a post about this here:
http://www.thecoverproject.net/forums/index.php?topic=27385.0- IMAGE ENHANCEMENT -Descreening is an important step. If you don't descreen, your printed output is gonna be a mess because the printer will be halftoning a scanned copy of halftones, which makes a mess. What we're trying to do here is to get as close to the original production image as possible. There are various ways to descreen, but the best is a Fourier Transform. Sattva makes a really good Photoshop plugin that can do this. In some cases, Photoshop's own filters, such as Median, Despeckle, Dust & Scratches will do a good enough job. The spot healing brush is useful for getting rid of one-off anomalies such as scratches, particles, etc.
Another very useful method of touching up an image is to separate it into color and brightness channels. One way to do this is to create a copy of the image and set it to LAB mode. Then copy/paste the L channel back into the RGB source image as a new layer, and then do the same for the A+B channels combined. These two channels can be edited as layers, and a rendering mode of 'Luminosity' for the top brightness layer with the colors layer underneath it will render it back to the original image. You can edit the colors layer to fix up color-based imperfections, while the details in the brightness layer remain unaffected.
- TEMPLATE BUILDING -If you're going to make a template, it's best to start with the best possible scan, which we've just prepared. I'm not too sure how intricate these kinds of templates are. When I made IDs, the templates got to be pretty crazy, with tons of data fields and multiple image fields in them. I'm guesing that the game covers won't be as complex. The benefit with using color management is that your scan will print with the same colors as the original document that you scanned. Printing it out will also yield identical colors. If you also profiled the monitor, then the colors you see on screen will be identical too.
- BARCODES -If printing something out that has a barcode, don't just print a scan of the barcode. Instead, scan the barcode with barcode scanning software and then regenerate it with barcode generation software. This way it will be in pristine shape. Also, be sure to set the interpolation to 'Nearest Neighbor' when sizing the barcode into the template, as you don't want any anti-aliasing. You want the barcode looking sharp.
- PRINTING -It's very important to have a good printer. Back in the day, I used an Epson R2000 with GutenPrint for Linux as a replacement RIP for when I had to print microtext. This allowed me to shoot black dots out at 5760x1440 dpi. I doubt that crazy levels of detail will be required for making covers. However, a good photo printer is going to be important. The R2000 also had a special feed for thick cardboard media that went straight through it without bending. This particular feature is probably gonna be important for making covers, so I'd look into a printer that has this. I know that the R2000 has been superceded by now. Do your research when selecting a printer. While inkjet is preferrable to laser, there are still other choices to make such as pigment versus dye. It's also good to look into whether the clear gloss cartridge will be beneficial in printing covers. I haven't tried this yet, but it seems like it could be pretty useful and result in pretty prints. Printers that feature this, and glossy black ink too should be considered, as the effects look pretty cool.
Your printer should already be profiled and calibrated with the right ICC profile, so that when you print your covers/boxes/manuals, you get the right colors. Be sure to standardize and document the settings you use with your printer. I recommend disabling all color correction and profiling in the printer drive, and handling all that yourself in Photoshop. This reduces the potential for error.
If you have any questions or feedback, please let me know either here or in a PM. I'm thinking about making a detailed guide on every step of the process. Some of this will require experimentation and testing, which I haven't done yet. All of my knowledge and experience comes from making IDS. While most of this transfers over, there are still application-specific things that I'll have to discover and figure out. One of the biggest takeaways from this should be that color management is the solution to the problem of color matching.
