Kbf_private_joker's Progress

[kbf_private_joker]

I have been messaging Phillyman back and forth and agreed to help him scan GamePro magazines, since I have 95% of them since 1995. I will log my progress in this forum.

I will probably scan 1 and then ask someone to critique it to make sure it is in the correct format.

-Noah

[Phillyman]

This is great news on the Gamepro front, I do have a nice collection but with the help of kbf_private_joker we should have a fairly complete collection from roughly 1993-2002.

[Thor]

Awesome glad to hear it.

[meppi]

Great to have you on the team.

A couple of things to get you started might help you out in knowing what we use for scanning the magazines.

First, you'd want to scan everything in 300dpi.

Make sure you get the pages as straight as possible when you scan them, because if you have to rotate them afterwards, you'll lose a bit of detail.

When you have a page scanned in, first crop it so that you only have the actual page without any white borders.

When this is done, resize the page to a width of 1280, and if possible clean them up where necessary.

Scratches, dust, white spots, dog ears, etc.

But then again, if this is a bit too much work, you can always do a raw scan and leave the editing to someone else once we get a couple of dedicated editors on board. :wink:

If you have any questions, fire away. :grin:

[kbf_private_joker]

I have completed issue #98. The following is the cover:

Not sure if the image tag will work

I did all the post-processing and let me tell you, getting a perfect alignment is a real pain. If this first issue isn't up to the standards, I still have the pages and can re-scan. I did a slight re-alignment on about 30% of the pages. Only seems to happen on one side (I simply flip when doing the reverse side). It is probably the side that is cut.

I started at 300dpi, then did any realignment that was needed, then did contrast/brightness boost, then resize to 150dpi (I wasn't aware of the 1280 pixel size). Then finally I saved at JPEG level 10. The final CBR turned out to be around 200MB.

Also, not sure where finished releases are uploaded.

By the way, that isn't my cover as I am still at work and don't have the scans with me.

-Noah

[meppi]

Looks great as far as I can see. :grin:

Notice that you used the other tutorial on the forum.

Next time you edit your scans I wouldn't change the resolution to 150dpi, it doesn't reduce the size by much at all, and when you have full colored paged with a single color and just text, there seem to be more artifacts than in 300dpi.

How many pages is the magazine? Because 200MB is indeed a bit large.

My magazine scans are around 60MB for 100 pages, sometimes a bit larger or smaller. Depends on how the pages are made up.

I upped the quality of my scans quite a bit after I got a new scanner and my JPGs are between 500-900kb now.

Could be since you save them at 10, as I save them at 9 in Photostudio, but it depends a bit from program to program.

Also, if your colors in your scans turn out to be nice and bright by themselves, I wouldn't mess around with the contrast and brightness.

But then again, this depends on the kind of scanner you're using.

My former one had pretty muddy colors, yet my new one is nice and bright by itself.

[Phillyman]

Yea my Nintendo Powers end up being around 80-100mb after resizing. Considering that GamePro's are much thicker I would expect them to be around 200mb-300mb

[kbf_private_joker]

I am using HP 5590 scanner. It is a shame the auto feeder puts green streaks on the pages, even after getting a new clear plastic guider.

What I will do next time is scan a few sample pages with and without contrast/brightness boost and everyone can give me feedback. Also, the GamePro was 205 pages (what a marathon for my first one). So about 900Kb to 1MB per page.

Let me know how the uploaded pages turned out. They are in the new folder under GamePro on the editor's ftp folder. Over the weekend, I would like to do 2 more. Phillyman, unless you have an objection, I would like to just start with my oldest issue that you don't yet have scanned and just work my way up. Unless you have a better idea. The missing mags that you don't have aren't going anywhere, so I don't see the hurry in getting them scanned first. I mainly wanted to get a missing one scanned to qualify for a 1 year premium membership. So, you can cross off November 1996 from the home page

Also, does this allow me access to the download FTP. I am curious as to how the other GamePro scans look.

Thanks guys,

Noah

Yea my Nintendo Powers end up being around 80-100mb after resizing. Considering that GamePro's are much thicker I would expect them to be around 200mb-300mb

[kbf_private_joker]

July 1997 is next on my todo list. Hopefully I can get it up today or by tomorrow.

Edit: July 1997 has been uploaded to FTP.

[vrap]

I only just checked out the news on the front page about the gamepro issues needed, I had a few of those but they're long gone :'( since my parents threw them out. It'd be great to have them in digital form if only to re-read the all-too-familiar issues