Eric, Love the Target. I don't mind the bright colors at all, but if you want to tone em down, reducing the saturation a few points is probably the way to go. Reds and Yellows are the colors that seem to be affected the most by changes in saturation (and they are also the colors I've noticed fade the most over time, Yellow being the trickiest of colors to deal with imo because grunge seems to show up very easily in it).
I agree with everything you said, Darwin. Your workflow makes pretty good sense. I would only take exception with using "Saturation" to adjust the colors, especially if not applied as an Adjustment Layer. It's not that it's a wrong way to do it, just that you can accomplish the same thing when you apply Levels (as an Adjustment Layer or otherwise) by moving the gray middle slider to the left to soften the intensity AND you can adjust EACH COLOR separately, too, should you want to pump up the yellows (play with the Blue channel in the Levels channels dropdown menu).
I'm glad to hear you're thinking about an external hard drive, Eric. Darwin is perceptive in noting that someday the technology is going to advance to a point where we'll want to re-edit some of these books. Just think of where we were ten years ago! What file sizes could be transmitted over the fledgling Internet? If you had a 1998 scan of a key book at 1998 file sizes, wouldn't YOU want to re-edit it with what you know now and the tools you have now to take advantage of the increased modern transmission capabilities? If we're preserving these books for the future, let's be perceptive enough to preserve the raw scans, too, for the future Internet.
If you want to compare file sizes, consider the scans that I make for my magazine, ImageS. I scan all of my material at 400 ppi, except for line art with is scanned at 1600 ppi (but in grayscale, not color). The raw scans range from a low of 50 MB to around 300 MB and my current network here has about 3.5 Terabytes of disc space available. The biggest "problem" with Photoshop is that it requires up to 8 times the file size in RAM to process the file for you. So with a 300 MB file, it wants 2.4 GB of RAM or else it uses disc space for RAM and slows down considerably. But 20 MB files only need 160 MB of RAM which is a piece of cake on modern computers.
(If you ever want to know why line art should be scanned at such high resolution, take a gander at the first GA Marvel Masterworks reprint of Marvel Mystery Comics. The line art there was scanned at 300 ppi, and when it was converted to pure black and white, every line got the jaggies and was stairstepped to the point of muddiness. Even the second issue was only scanned at 600 ppi and it still wasn't enough to avoid the jaggies. Pure B&W (as bitmap, not grayscale) requires a lot of data to compensate for the lack of anti-aliasing that "fools" your eyes into perceiving smoothness of line in grayscale reproductions. 1200 to 1600 ppi will do it.)
Speaking of Spacehawk colors, Eric, do we know if Wolverton had any input to the coloring of his stories? I'm noticed that they are somewhat different than the other features in the books and was wondering why
And I am VERY aware of the sad condition of many of my books, but, hey, at least I don't have to worry about them getting too much worse during the scanning process - which is one reason why I'm comfortable loaning them out...
Keep up the good work.
Author
Topic: The JVJ collection: OtherEric's scans (Read 94071 times)
