gingerbeardman work in progress

[gingerbeardman]

Electric Brain

#33, April 1993
#34, May 1993
#35, June 1993

[gingerbeardman]

Scanning - complete

• Fujitsu fi-4530C
• VueScan 9

Processing - in progress

• RetroBatch
• Acorn
• Photoshop
• Split Vertical (my own tool)
• Deskew (my own tool)

[E-Day]

That doesn't seem to be one that is in our database. Excellent!

What are these tools you're using. Apart from Photoshop, what do the others do?

[gingerbeardman]

Good question!

Basically to automate as much grunt work as possible, where it's possible the computer can do the work and, most importantly, not get it wrong.

These are all Mac-only apps, except deskew.

• Deskew (aka Straighten)
  Straightening images. Drag on a bunch of scans and have them automatically "deskewed" or straightened. Uses open-source command line deskew which is available for Mac/Win/Linux https://www.macworld.co.uk/download/system-desktop-tools/deskew-14-3330895/ I put a drag-and-drop GUI round it because I arrived at some settings that work pretty much all the time.
  
  Here is a sample of before/after the automatic deskew/straighten of my TIFF scan.

• Split Vertical
  Wrapper for imagemagik command line convert crop, so I can split double page spreads down the middle. Drag on a bunch of images, get a set of new images for left/right pages, automatically renumbered to be correct order. I put a drag-and-drop GUI round it to avoid the command line, and the renumbering is my own work. Edit: it just occurred to me I can do this in my Retrobatch workflow. 
• Acorn - lightweight alternative to Photoshop
  I use it in preference to Photoshop because it loads instantly and I find it so much quicker to use.
  I only use Photoshop rarely, if there's something Acorn cannot do. Very rarely. 
• Retrobatch - workflow oriented batch image processing
  I am using it for resizing, converting to JPG and setting DPI. Made by the same company as Acorn. Amazing app!

   

 

Edited December 7, 2018 by gingerbeardman
added deskew images

[E-Day]

I have an action in Photoshop that will do the colour correction and resizing /saving all at once. What takes me time is straightening pages and cropping the edges. 

[kitsunebi]

8 hours ago, E-Day said:

I have an action in Photoshop that will do the colour correction and resizing /saving all at once. What takes me time is straightening pages and cropping the edges. 

I make the same action as what you're talking about as well.  I have to make a new one for each mag, since every mag is printed differently and needs slightly different adjustments (I sometimes need multiple sets of similar actions for the same mag if it has multiple types of paper stock within the same issue).  Still, it only takes a minute or two to make one, so it isn't a big deal that I can't just use the same action for everything.

[gingerbeardman]

On 12/6/2018 at 12:28 AM, E-Day said:

What takes me time is straightening pages and cropping the edges. 

Indeed. The deskew/straighten tool is a real time saver. I only had to redo one spread from each issue of Electric Brain because there were so many slanted boxes on the page it seemed to confuse the algorithm. It's possible I could tweak the settings, but time was better spent doing those pages manually.

Cropping edges, yes quite a ball-ache. I have two crops saved in Acorn: Left Aligned Scan & Right Aligned Scan. Depending the orientation in which I feed the pages into the scanner (I was quite inconsistent this time) the scans come out either left aligned or right aligned. The saved crops get me 95% of the way to the exact crop, some minor cursor key action and press return to accept, then save it, close it, and next!

Acorn has a great crop mode where saved crops, cursor key adjustment, mouse rotation, ruler guides are all accessible at the same time, resulting in a very fast workflow.

Anyway, here is an update with a first pass to get opinion and feedback:

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ygacekc82akv0/ (3 x 33MB cbz)

I have done no retouching or color work on these, they are simply passed through my tools:

• straighten (full auto)
• crop (assisted manual; some manual adjustment and rotation in rare cases)
• split (full auto)
• resize and convert to JPG (full auto)
• zip (full auto)
• rename and upload (manual)

Thoughts appreciated! My first serious scan, please be gentle

matt

Edited December 13, 2018 by gingerbeardman

[E-Day]

I'll check that out tonight hopefully. I should give deskew another go. I think I tried it a while back but couldn't get it to work.

[gingerbeardman]

I also used one more tool: 

JPEGmini - the does some high tech optimisation of JPG images to reduce filesize in a way that it's not possible to see any visual differences. 

My workflow here was: 

• Save as JPEG 99% (Retrobatch; full auto)
• JPEG mini (full auto)

This reduced total filesize by around 35%.

The only thing to note is that if these JPGs are edited and resaved with another tool, the file size is likely to increase dramatically as other tools don't do as good a job when saving. 

Edited December 8, 2018 by gingerbeardman

[gingerbeardman]

GAMEST

#38, November 1989

Test scans

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WaY5WG9IGiGSF9WB64v9yCHOcGjvYoX8/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ReCDW82tJwlS8gD1O9l9K-9MkTDXYWUj/view?usp=sharing

Edited January 19, 2019 by gingerbeardman

[gingerbeardman]

When scanning GAMEST, its obvious that the printing process was not very refined and that the pages have not been bound in exactly where they should be. So, the edge of the neighbouring/opposite page is visible on the page I'm working on.

Attached is a crop from an unprocessed scan, showing the yellow edge encroaching on the white page.

Any thoughts or precedent on this issue?

[kitsunebi]

I've never seen a stapled magazine that didn't look like that.  I'm not sure what advice you're asking for.  Obviously, the page on the left ends where the yellow ends and the page on the right begins where the white begins.  All it means is that you have to edit out the crease and the staple holes from the side on which they appear after cropping out the other side.  Content aware fill makes that a 2 second process unless the page has an image that carries over onto the adjacent page, in which case you'll have to be a little more careful.

[MigJmz]

Don't do Gamest April '91! I'm working on that one right now.

[gingerbeardman]

2 hours ago, MigJmz said:

Don't do Gamest April '91! I'm working on that one right now.

You're safe, I only own Nov 89

[gingerbeardman]

3 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

I've never seen a stapled magazine that didn't look like that.  I'm not sure what advice you're asking for.  Obviously, the page on the left ends where the yellow ends and the page on the right begins where the white begins.  All it means is that you have to edit out the crease and the staple holes from the side on which they appear after cropping out the other side.  Content aware fill makes that a 2 second process unless the page has an image that carries over onto the adjacent page, in which case you'll have to be a little more careful.

That's OK, all clear. So it's cool that some pages will be wider than others by quite a bit?

[kitsunebi]

11 minutes ago, gingerbeardman said:

That's OK, all clear. So it's cool that some pages will be wider than others by quite a bit?

When saving pages, they should be resized to a constant height.  The width will vary page by page.

[gingerbeardman]

Great, that's what I have been doing.

Onwards!

[gingerbeardman]

Electric Brain x3 are complete

I've been trialling some new software called ScanTailor Advanced https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced/releases/tag/v1.0.16 it's for Windows and Linux, but I run the Windows version on my Mac through Wine. It's nice, seems full featured, but I'd need to start from a mag from scratch using it to see if it really works for me.

[gingerbeardman]

Here I used solely ScanTailor to edit it to this state.

GAMEST Issue 038 (November 1989)
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/5gbg3is75dihe/GAMEST

~92MB cbz

Edited January 23, 2019 by gingerbeardman

[kitsunebi]

6 hours ago, gingerbeardman said:

Here I used solely ScanTailor to edit it to this state.

GAMEST Issue 038 (November 1989)
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/5gbg3is75dihe/GAMEST

~92MB cbz

Your post is a little unclear - are you saying that this is a finalized edit, or just a work in progress that you're hoping to get feedback on?

[MigJmz]

Good start but it needs cleanup.

[gingerbeardman]

Working on it

[kitsunebi]

Not having the actual pages in front of me, I'm not sure if it's the magazine itself or the scanner, but these pages have the strangest tint (at least, to my eye.)  I just edited the back cover advertisement in order to add it to the gallery and had to tweak all kinds of stuff before I was happy with the colors.  Again, without the mag in front of me, I have no idea what it's ACTUALLY supposed to look like, so I was really just using artistic license, but hey - my edit, my color choice.  I'm sure your full magazine edit will look different, and that's totally fine.  It just surprised me because the usual techniques I have for punching up an image to my liking had to be thrown out on this one.

For comparison, the raw vs edit:

[gingerbeardman]

Yes, it could be the scanner setup. Will look into it!

[gingerbeardman]

Good spot, I tracked down the problem. The green level in VueScan had been dialled down somehow (slip of the mouse wheel?) and I had not noticed it because my macOS adjusts display colours at night to ease eye strain (Night Shift). Good spot!

Will redo the scans (and save the raw scans this time!)