Literally: How do I give scans to Retromags

[BlackSquirrel]

2 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

images more viewable?  Of course not.  Does it look a hell of a lot better?  I'd like to hear anyone try to claim otherwise.

Hi honey

In the world of preservation, the better plan is to document what's actually there, as opposed to what you think should be there. That is to say, advocating as little editing as possible, unless you know exactly what you're doing.

So from a preservation standpoint, my boss' original scan is indeed the better version. The magazine isn't in the best of shape, but the scan is a preservation of what it actually is - a magazine not in the best of shape.

Now obviously unless you were undertaking some sort of chemical study, nobody has any need to preseve water damage, but the true solution to that problem is to wait until a better scan comes along, not try and "fix" the brown stains. Because then you're having to guess the precise areas of damage, and what the original hue was meant to be, and indeed the composition of the printed material and the printing techniques used in 1990. Perhaps Mega Drive Fan was never truly white - a lot of the old UK magazines certainly weren't - I wouldn't want to guess.

As a more practical example:
https://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File:SSM_UK_37.pdf&page=80

[BlackSquirrel]

(where's your edit button)

Sonic is purple in this scan - the original magazine looks like this, because of the way it's printed. Do you colour correct it? How do you know it doesn't need colour correcting?


Luckily though, these aren't completely pressing concerns because nobody seems to be doing a good job at preserving magazines. And there's a good reason for that - there isn't a great deal of need for magazines to be preserved - they should be preserved because that's the best way to do things, but the obvious next question is "what are you going to do with this scan?". Usually the answers are "read it" or "edit it in some way".

While we should probably be getting into the full fat preservation game, Retro CDN is acting as a practical resource for our wikis. I use scans to document things and verify facts - that's a higher concern for us than pristine copies of 25 year old magazines (or at least while there's technical issues afoot). I want the best scans possible but I also don't want to be spending my life worrying about the quality of an already non-perfect scan, when the intention is to document the Sega Saturn's history or something.


Incidentally the same applies to old home computers. Want to emulate an Amiga game? Chances are you'll be dealing with a cracked version that bypasses all the copy protection and security gubbins. There is (or at least was) an archive for pure, byte-correct images of official floppy disks, but while this is an essential job for the preservation game, it's not a practical solution for most people emulating Amigas.

And these super duper achives can only exist because cracked copies are widespread - it's not an either-or - there are very few scans of the UK's official Sega Magazine (hint hint I want some) so at this stage I'm not worried if they're 300dpi, 600dpi, or 348098204932dpi.

But Retromags can make its own decisions. Point is, you ain't gonna get no perfect scans.

[kitsunebi]

First, we aren't interested in "preserving" flaws brought about by time or physical abuse, we're more interested in restorative work.  The goal is to eliminate those flaws and create something that doesn't look like an old, faded, scratched-up piece of crap that's been sitting in a damp cardboard box for decades.

If your goal is to accurately reproduce every flaw in your personal copy, that's fine, that's your philosophy.  You have yours, and we have ours.  I promise I will never tell you how to edit your scans (if you ever decide to make any), unless you want to upload them here, of course, at which point they will be subject to our stated requirements.

None of the major sites scanning magazines is in the business of preserving flaws.  We all try to make a magazine as presentable as possible (though some, like the Out Of Print Archive, take such matters to FAR greater extremes than we do.)  When it comes to removing stains, scratched and tears, well, it's a given that those aren't supposed to be there.  You're right that it does take some guesswork if any color correction is undertaken, but we keep that to a minimum.  Perhaps if you take a closer look at the edited pic above you'll realize that the "white" color isn't actually white and has been matched exactly to the color in one of the cleaner parts of the unedited pic near the logo.  At any rate, it's bound to look a hell of a lot closer to the original than a brown-stained copy does.

Again, you're getting off track and dragging the conversation into negative territory.  What started out as "Hey, awesome!  Thanks for the scans.  They don't conform to our stated requirements, so we can't host them here, but we'd be glad to see them hosted elsewhere" has turned into some misguided attempt to construe those words as an attack on the merit of the scans.  I and the other scanners I know aren't a fan of your practice of shrinking our files, but that's a separate issue.  We have nothing but respect for Scarred Sun or anyone else who contributes scans to this hobby.  The fact that we can't host them here is not meant as an insult.  They simply aren't aligned with rules which were established for very practical reasons years ago, which is fine - as you point out, you're operating under a different philosophy than we are.  We're glad they exist, and we're glad there are a number of other forums in which they can be shared.  So let's move on, since this is turning into one of the most negative "thank you" threads I've ever seen.

[kitsunebi]

Oh, and...Welcome to Retromags!!!

(Since seeing you logged in on a near-daily basis for years, I've always wondered if you ever stopped to browse the forums.  Please feel welcome to join in on... more pleasant conversations sometime - we're always in need of more active forums around here.  )

15 minutes ago, BlackSquirrel said:

(where's your edit button)

I could be mistaken (in other words, I don't remember), but I think the edit button becomes available after you have a certain number of posts and go from "newcomer" to "member."

[Akane]

It is a question. Does this match the quality of retromags?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ma68ct4zsll448w/The Superfamicom_19930108.cbz?dl=0

It is my first time to use Dropbox, so please let me know if you have a problem.

[kitsunebi]

Hello Akane!

It looks good to me!  The only problem I see is that several pages have scan lines.  This isn't such a big deal, and we'd still be happy to host the issue here if you like, but in the future, just be sure to clean the scanner glass whenever scan lines show up.  They can be removed in Photoshop, but it's much easier to just avoid them entirely by keeping the scanner glass clean.

For example, this is from the inside cover of your scan:

There are many blue and green scan lines caused by dust on the scanning glass.

Here's the same image after I cleaned it up in Photoshop:

 

We would love to have another active Japanese scanner!  I'm very busy always working on the database, so I only scan magazines every now and then.  And there are SO MANY Japanese magazines!

Let me know if you would like us to host this issue and I can get it uploaded for you.

 

[Akane]

2 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Hello Akane!

It looks good to me!  The only problem I see is that several pages have scan lines.  This isn't such a big deal, and we'd still be happy to host the issue here if you like, but in the future, just be sure to clean the scanner glass whenever scan lines show up.  They can be removed in Photoshop, but it's much easier to just avoid them entirely by keeping the scanner glass clean.

 

Thank you for your reply. Also, thank you for team members' invitation.

It was scanned with ADF scanner long time ago, so please forgive that the vertical line is included. (So I hate it and mainly use flatbed scanner recently.)

It is useful if you are using files that have been resized to 300 dpi by performing inclination correction / trimming / minimum retouching. Including the files uploaded this time, I plan to upload it periodically from the non-Sega magazines such as The Super Nintendo and Dengeki Playstation on a regular basis.

Because I am unfamiliar with English, I also add original Japanese sentences below.

お返事ありがとうございます。また、チームメンバーへのお誘いありがとうございます。
随分昔にADFスキャナでスキャンしたものなので、縦線が入っているのはお許しください。（最近はそれを嫌って主にフラットベッドスキャナを使っています。）

傾き補正・トリミング・最低限のレタッチを行って300dpi相当でリサイズしてるファイルでしたらお役に立てそうですね。今回アップロードしたファイルを含めて、Theスーパーファミコンや電撃Playstationなど非セガの雑誌より何度かに分けて定期的にアップロードする予定です。
 

[kitsunebi]

OK, if anyone is following this, I fixed up the file and cleaned up most of the scanlines.  It's ready to be released, but due to the changes Phillyman is putting the site through at the moment, our usual methods of uploading files no longer work.  I'm currently waiting for the uploaded file to sync with our Seedbox so that I can post a download link for everyone to get the corrected file.  Hopefully it won't take too long, but I honestly have no idea when to expect it.　Or else we just wait for Phillyman to wake up.

 

1 hour ago, Akane said:

今回アップロードしたファイルを含めて、Theスーパーファミコンや電撃Playstationなど非セガの雑誌より何度かに分けて定期的にアップロードする予定です。

僕は電撃PlayStationが何枚も持っています（１５０冊ぐらいかな）。よかったら、電撃PlayStationをスキャンする時前、僕と確認できますよ。

[Akane]

On 7/29/2018 at 5:25 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

僕は電撃PlayStationが何枚も持っています（１５０冊ぐらいかな）。よかったら、電撃PlayStationをスキャンする時前、僕と確認できますよ。

Dengeki PlayStation has 200 scanned data since the first issue of 1995. Firstly I will upload from the Super Famicom in order.

So, I tried to upload the second book immediately, but when trying to upload a file with Home - Downloads - Submit a file, I got an error and it was Upload Failed.

It is this file that I try to upload. Is there something wrong with my method?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ia49f1rcj3jpqe7/The Superfamicom_19930305.cbz?dl=0

電撃PlayStationは1995年の初号から200冊くらいのスキャン済データがあります。まずはTheスーパーファミコンから順にアップロードしていきます。

それで、早速２冊目をアップロードしようと思ったのですが、Home-Downloads-Submit a fileでファイルをアップロードしようとしたところ、エラーが出てUpload Failedになってしまいました。

上げようと思っていたのはこのファイルになります。私の方法に何か問題があるのでしょうか。