[OtherEric]

I just got the first box of books from JVJ and am looking forward to starting scanning on Monday.  I thought I would post a few opening thoughts here, though, since this is somewhat different from scanning my own books.

First of all, just a quick list of what I have to work with this time:  Several issues of Target, a couple from v2 and a lot from v3.  ALL the missing issues of Authentic Police Cases.  And Happy comics 32 and 33; both of which have Frazetta stories in them!  When it gets closer to picking the second group of books I'll open up to suggestions from the group here; I plan to gradually work through most of the Targets as I go along among other things.  But I want to get books for everybody, not just my personal choices.  I don't know enough about old comics to know everything I would want to see!

Some technical notes on how I'm approaching the scanning.  Since this is my only chance at the books, I will be scanning everything at 300 DPI and keeping files of the raw scans for myself, in case anybody ever needs to get at them later.  If you ever have a need for those, just ask me.  I'll be posting at more normal sizes unless there is some reason to use the bigger scans.  JVJ was nice enough to throw in a copy of Photoshop Elements, as well.  So I'll be trying my hand at more extensive cleanup than I have in the past.  I trust you all to keep an eye on me and correct me; I really do need the advice.  With that said, I would also be delighted to hand over some of the editing to others if you wanted to take a crack at it.  Just let me know.

Also, I want to thank everybody who has been contributing to the postage fund!

[Yoc]

Sounds Great Eric!

I've never used Elements but if it's anything close to as powerful as it's older brother PhotoShop CS - you've got yourself a good app.  But there will be a learning curve for sure.  Don't hesitate to contact me if you have a question.  I'll do my best to answer them.

[rez]

If you'd like I could edit out a few books.
If so, you could send me one book at my email addy and see how it pans out.
Cheers

I just got the first box of books from JVJ and am looking forward to starting scanning on Monday.  I thought I would post a few opening thoughts here, though, since this is somewhat different from scanning my own books.

First of all, just a quick list of what I have to work with this time:  Several issues of Target, a couple from v2 and a lot from v3.  ALL the missing issues of Authentic Police Cases.  And Happy comics 32 and 33; both of which have Frazetta stories in them!  When it gets closer to picking the second group of books I'll open up to suggestions from the group here; I plan to gradually work through most of the Targets as I go along among other things.  But I want to get books for everybody, not just my personal choices.  I don't know enough about old comics to know everything I would want to see!

Some technical notes on how I'm approaching the scanning.  Since this is my only chance at the books, I will be scanning everything at 300 DPI and keeping files of the raw scans for myself, in case anybody ever needs to get at them later.  If you ever have a need for those, just ask me.  I'll be posting at more normal sizes unless there is some reason to use the bigger scans.  JVJ was nice enough to throw in a copy of Photoshop Elements, as well.  So I'll be trying my hand at more extensive cleanup than I have in the past.  I trust you all to keep an eye on me and correct me; I really do need the advice.  With that said, I would also be delighted to hand over some of the editing to others if you wanted to take a crack at it.  Just let me know.

Also, I want to thank everybody who has been contributing to the postage fund!

[Yoc]

It might be easiest for Eric just to upload it to your FTP folder Rez and let you grab the raw scans from there.

[rez]

Duh, of course. What was I thinking?

It might be easiest for Eric just to upload it to your FTP folder Rez and let you grab the raw scans from there.

[OtherEric]

I'll send you one or two books later today, once I've gotten them scanned to start with!  And thanks for the offer of help.

[rez]

Eric-
I'm working with pretty basic tools and don't know how to crop a page after it has been sent in large form as I always cropped the books before the initial save which helps simplify the copy/paste work when cleaning up the book.

Example on the interior pages before saving I would crop to like a quarter inch or so outside the perimeter panel lines, save large, do the copy/paste work, then save and resize to 1024.

Does it complicate things on your end when scanning to crop before the save?

[JonTheScanner]

Rez, what program are you using.  It would be an unusual image editing program in which cropping wasn't pretty easy to do.

[JVJ]

Hey rez, I just installed a old version (3.0) of Photoshop Elements from 2004. It came free with a graphics tablet, but I've also gotten copies with every scanner I ever bought. Your scanner may have come with some comparable software to manipulate images after scanning.

The point is that this "ancient" (in software years) software has a rotate and crop tool, a healing brush, a clone tool, and adjustment layers - all of which are more powerful that the first version of Photoshop I had back in 1997. If you don't have something that came with your scanner, I'll be happy to send you this disc, which also has Corel Painter Essentials 2 and nik Color Efex Pro 2.0 G.E. (all with serial numbers).

There should be no reason to struggle with correcting scans.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[OtherEric]

I just use irfanview to do what editing I've done so far; the main reason I didn't crop is because different people have different tastes in how much to crop.  I generally view leveling the pages as fairly important for myself, because of that I crop the artwork fairly close so the borders are _relatively_ uniform.  When I send a book to somebody to edit I'm trusting their tastes and judgment, and some people like to crop based on the original page shape, rather than the artwork.  So I don't crop before I send them out; I leave that for the editor to choose.

If you would like me to level and crop the pages and send you out an updated version I can do that, just let me know.  Or you can grab irfanview, it's a free program.

Also, my scanner software automatically saves; the only changes I made before sending you the files was to flip the upside-down scans.

[JVJ]

There are two factors that I personally insist upon in my own scanning:

1. Don't let the scanning software do ANYTHING! No rotating, no resizing, no descreening, no sharpening, no NOTHING! Scanners are at their best when they capture an image - EVERYthing else can be and should be done better in post-processing software, be it Photoshop, Elements, or Corel or whatever. Letting your scanner make decisions for you will guarantee a lesser-quality scan than you can do yourself. It may take a little practice, but believe me you can do better than the "averages" that are used by the scanning software.

2. Never scan in .jpg! JPEG is a lossy compression format which means that your scanner is going to decide to throw some pixels away when it saves the file in that format. I'll repeat that: When you save in JPEG, you're not getting all the information that your scanner took in. And, even worse, if you RE-save in JPEG later, the compression throws MORE pixels away in its attempt to compress the file even further. JPEG should be the FINAL conversion you make after scanning, straightening, cleaning, etc. Scan in TIFF, PNG, PSD or whatever, but not JPEG and not GIF. If you're sending your scans to someone else to be edited, it really is better to send them larger files in TIFF format than it is to convert to JPEG, let them edit the files and then have them convert them to JPEG again. Honest.

If you have Photoshop or PS Elements 3.0 or later, you have access to adjustment layers and they can allow you to do non-destructive editing and color correcting - which is great. If anyone wants to discuss how to use them, I'll be happy to explain.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[OtherEric]

I had already figured out 1.  Unfortunately, while 2 makes sense, I hadn't been doing that.  I'll start doing it from here on out, but won't rescan anything unless somebody editing something specifically requests it.  Thank you for the heads up, Jim.  Even if it should be obvious, most of us here are at best talented amateurs.  I'm learning new stuff almost every book I scan still.

[rez]

I always cropped the pages during the scanning process before saving.
Thus the pages are saved in the intial large size already cropped.
Receiving large scans thru the FTP are too large for the cropping tool thru what I am using Paint in XP Pro as I must scroll around to see the total page and the cropping tool is limited to the monitor size.

If I shrink the page down to within the cropping tool size and then enlarge it back it will affect the detail quality of the image, no?

Hey, This Bulletin just in.  Now I read down the other posts in this thread and see JV's and OtherEric's comments seeing perhaps I will try using the Irfanview cropping tool as I didn't even know it had one.

I will experiment a bit and get back later.
Ok, this is later and the Irfanview will not open the files.

I am willing to learn better methods and if needed download the necessary programs.
Will be out of town away from the puter for the T-weekend but will hit the ground running upon return.

Rez, what program are you using.  It would be an unusual image editing program in which cropping wasn't pretty easy to do.

[Yoc]

Irfan will work just fine Rez.
I use it as the last step in my scans.  After doing all my PhotoShop edits and saved as PNG.
I do a final tweak if needed and then crop and save with Irfran as a jpg.

Draw a box around the image area with the mouse and hit 'Y' to crop.  Then 'S' to save.

-Yoc

[rez]

The zipfile is raw of jpegs.  Attempts to open with Irfanview bring up a window citing 'Unknown File Format or File Not Found'.

editted to add: Wait! oh, new plugins.

Nope, that didn't change anything. Same window.

Irfan will work just fine Rez.
I use it as the last step in my scans.  After doing all my PhotoShop edits and saved as PNG.
I do a final tweak if needed and then crop and save with Irfran as a jpg.

Draw a box around the image area with the mouse and hit 'Y' to crop.  Then 'S' to save.

-Yoc

[JVJ]

You're dealing with two different display tools, rez.
I don't know irfan at all, but here's the technical aspects of viewing your scan on the display:

1. Your monitor displays either 72 of 96 pixels per inch - PERIOD. Let's round that to 75 ppi for this discussion, okay? So, if you post a scan at 150 ppi it displays as twice as large as the original comic and you have to use the scroll bars to see it all. Post it at 300 ppi and it is FOUR times the actual size. At 75 ppi, if you have a monitor that will display 800 ppi vertically, you'll see the entire pic of a 10 inch comic scan.
   a. Every editing software that I've encountered (and I have to admit that only includes the Photoshop and Elements family, and Painter Essentials) allows you to view the image at different sizes. It's a DISPLAY change.
   b. Suppose you want to see a 300 ppi scan on your monitor that only displays 800 pixels in the vertical direction. Somehow you tell the software to display it 75 ppi or 25% of whatever criteria the software asks for - sometimes it's simply "fit to screen". The software looks at each group of 16 pixels (4 pixels by 4 pixels) and averages the color into ONE pixel and then DISPLAYS the results on your monitor. NO pixels are harmed or changed in this method, the software just makes the image fit on your screen at a lower resolution with less detail.

2. If you change the resolution to 75 ppi (the proper term is "downsample") you take those 16 pixels and actually CHANGE them to one pixel. Yes, you then accomplish the task of getting the entire image on the screen for your crop tool, but you can never recapture the detail that you threw away to get there.
   a. I recommend that you NEVER do this.
   b. Your software must have some implementation of method 1 above. Someone in the group should be able to tell you how to access it.
   c. In Photoshop (I know, I know, but it MIGHT work the same way in irfan, too), when the image is too big for the display, when I drag the corner of the crop tool towards the part of the image that is offscreen, the display pans the image until I can see the other corner. All I do is drag towards the part of the image I can't see. Try it, it can't hurt.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[OtherEric]

You will need to unzip the zip file to get to the jpegs, then you can open the images with irfanview.  The zipping is just to make it easier to send them all together.

[rez]

Got it!
Sometimes I just have to play around the creek bank 'til I fall in.

[rez]

Eric-
I zipped a finished page and placed it in your file on FTP as a rep to see if it will meet the specs or not. Under pg3. 

You will need to unzip the zip file to get to the jpegs, then you can open the images with irfanview.  The zipping is just to make it easier to send them all together.

[OtherEric]

Looks good to me, Rez.

[OtherEric]

And, after nearly a page and a half of discussion, we have my first upload from the JVJ collection:

Target Comics v2 n5 is now available for download.

I'm VERY interested in feedback on the editing on this one; in addition to my usual trimming and leveling of pages I used Photoshop to do some color leveling.  Mostly the auto leveling, to be sure.  This may not be the best looking scan I've ever done, I do think it's the most improved from the source material scan I've done yet.  Like I said, let me know.  I'm sure I'll get better as I get more practice, but I want to go relatively slowly so I don't screw things up on the way.

One minor note:  I did keep the files in TIF form until the final save; due to the size of the files I'm only keeping my unedited reference copies at 150 DPI for space reasons.  But if we need to go back to them that's probably still better source material than 300 DPI JPEGs.  Once again, input from others is appreciated.  I don't expect in most cases to need them; but like I said it's not a bad idea to keep the raw scans for the rare case when we will since I won't have the books to rescan.

Most importantly, enjoy the book.  Wolverton Spacehawk and a lot of other fun stuff in this one.

[phabox]

A Fun book and for once a text page worth reading.

Scan wise its hard to fault, looks like it may have been a challenging job.

Hard to comment on the colour without seeing the original, it reminded me a little of some of the better archive reprints, NOT a problem as far as i'm concerned but not everyone will agree with me.

Of course it IS a fact that many of the original Golden Age books WERE somewhat over coloured anyway, case in point many of the Quality titles, this was said to be due to the fact that Busy Arnold was colour blind and did'nt really know what he was approving !

If your future scans are of this standard you won't get any complaints from me.

-Nigel

[rez]

That Dick Cole blurb on the inside back cover makes me want to go find that issue of BlueBolt!

[JVJ]

As I mentioned in another thread, I liked them, Eric, except where they showed what a piece of junk my copy is (I liked your very tactful "most improved from the source material"). Three important aspect of [Levels][Auto] that you should know:

1. The first is that you can apply it as an "Adjustment Layer" - just click the half-black/half-white circle at the bottom of the layers palette and choose [Levels] and then [Auto] as before. Try moving the gray triangle adjustment to the left or right to mitigate or accentuate the intensity.

2. The "Adjustment Layer" appears above your Background Layer in the palette AND you can adjust the "Opacity" of the adjustment by changing the opacity of that layer. Play with this if you find the colors too intense.

3. With an Adjustment Layer, you can go back into the file tomorrow and change the Levels that you set with [Auto] or even remove the adjustment layer completely and start over.

And I'd urge you to rethink saving at 150 ppi (not Dpi - a completely different measuring unit that has NO application to computer scans - it's nonsensical, like saying your scan weighs 50 grams). A gigabyte of storage goes for about 20

[OtherEric]

I think with my Thanksgiving overtime money I'll grab myself an external hard drive so I can store comic scans.  Like you said, it's a good idea to keep decent archives if I do the work.  I'll keep playing with photoshop; I'm working on the Target v2 n1 now.  There I'm playing with adjusting the brightness and figuring how to lighten up the pages without washing things out.  I think it will look pretty good; I am learning.

Actually, most of your books are quite good for scanning; the big problem on the early Targets is how dark the paper has gotten.  A lot of that has to be the original paper because those books aren't brittle at all despite the paper color.  The "most improved" was not a dig on your books, it was the fact that until recently my scans were very dependent on the quality of the book for the quality of the scan.  I just happened to have a few stray nice books, more by accident than anything else.