My second magazine scan!

[marktrade]

Following the advice from E-Day and Kiwi on my first scan, I've made this scan of the US Official Sega Dreamcast Magazine issue 1.

https://archive.org/details/OfficialSegaDreamcast1September1999

Although it is uploaded as a test file (meaning it will automatically delete itself in 30 days) I nonetheless made it as if it were final.

Already I noticed my first mistake! I compressed it with RAR instead of zip, since E-Day mentioned he had trouble opening the CBZ file I made last time, but this time I forgot to rename the resulting RAR file to CBR. A minor note, but still noteworthy.

I've cropped all the pages so that they are flush with their boundaries. I may not have perfectly addressed every page, but it should meet or exceed the standard. In a small number of cases the quality of the page did not permit it, because the glue advanced too close to the content of the page. I'm becoming very aware of how often the source material was misaligned during printing (or composition) and how aligning everything perfectly when archiving scans is often not even close to possible. This is just the nature of the material and I accept that.

Every page is sized to 2600 pixels in height at 300 DPI. The RAR file contains 126 jpeg files compressed at level 9. The size comes out to about 240 MB. I originally tried a batch at 2100 pixels tall but the text still looked a bit too pixelated for my taste. I wonder if I should go slightly higher for a magazine of this size. There is some smaller text that still looks a little jaggy. Maybe 2800?

Thanks for all your feedback!

[KiwiArcader]

You wouldn't believe how many issues are not cut straight resulting in slightly skewed pages. It's probably more common than straight to be honest. Some are only out by a couple of mm's to so and I tend to just run with them. It is a reflection of the print media after all. Some are truly shocking however and need at least a small amount of correction to make them reasonable but when you do that it results in cropping of pages so the trade off is lack of accuracy.

Do you? Don't you? That's really a personal decision. There will be a group that say do it and others that say don't.

Did you apply brightness/contrast correction? Images are a tad dark but I don't have a physical copy so don't know if that is just how it was printed. Some mags are and some aren't so I cannot tell. That's not a gripe. My Atomic issues for example are like that and I apply no correction at all.

She's a lovely scan and I'd happily have it on my site for sure. :-)

[marktrade]

Now that you mention it, the program I'm using now does have a default black point at 16. It's meant to make any faded typing appear more solid, but I should set that back to zero. I have noticed some fading in headline text that that setting fixes, but you have to zoom pretty far in to notice, and that's something that can always be adjusted later.

Thanks! My next scan will be for real. And I'll rescan this issue later if it looks like I can improve on it.

[KiwiArcader]

She's looking pretty darned good anyway so I'd back burner redoing it unless YOU are unhappy with the results.

I have seen plenty worse believe me. It's way more than good enough. I just noticed that some white pages have a little yellowing near the edges which has the appearance of being lessened through a little correction but then again I have been doing this for a long time so I tend to see these things. As it stands I am more than happy to have this on my site.

Big thumbs up from me. Great to have another person prepared to spend their personal time preserving great game mags for everyone to enjoy.

[marktrade]

Some of the pages have definitely yellowed from age and yes the program I'm using now also had the white point adjusted by default to "drop out" light gray blotchiness in the background. I'm learning that it's that setting that also helps eliminate some of the bleed-thru from the other side of the page during duplex scanning.

I'm not actually sure how to adjust the white point and the black point independently in either Quickscan or Scandall Pro. I decided to buy a Mac-only program the helps make scanning go faster. I think you should be able to in those programs, though. If you do find the white point setting, try setting it at 231 to see if that helps.

[KiwiArcader]

I actually don't mind yellowing as long as it is uniform across the page. It's just a reflection of the paper stock used and the age of the magazine. You should see some of the later issues of Antic I have in my collection. Talk about them taking yellowing to a whole new level. It's like art I tell you.....

[marktrade]

If I redo that scan, it shouldn't be too hard to knock out on the problem pages in post. I am doing issue 2 right now with a 0 black point and it hasn't yellowed nearly as bad. I haven't noticed it at all. I think it dropped out pretty evenly this time.

I'll continue moving on to more issues because I think it's psychologically important to feel like I'm getting something done and not like I'm doing the same thing over and over again!

[KiwiArcader]

Absolutely agree with that comment. You'll end up putting out as much content as the OoPA guys do if you keep revisiting stuff.