Vidiot Magazine

[VGBounceHouse]

Howdy!

I know it's been a while but I have a lot of things cooking including a number of magazines currently not indexed here. I was hoping for some feedback about what to do next and any mistakes I made preparing this magazine.

Vidiot was a short-lived videogame magazine from the publishers of the CREEM music magazine. I have copies of the premiere issue (discussed here) as well as the third issue. I'm not sure how long the run was but I don't believe it was more than a half dozen.

The premiere issue is dated September/October 1982:

I have set up a temporary page to access my work:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1982/09/vidiot/

The scan was done at 600dpi after debinding on an Epson WF-7610 so facing pages were scanned together. I did no color correction but cleaned up artifacts where possible. The magazine also had a centerfold which I did not include in the archive but the full 300dpi image is available at the link.

The archive was made from 300dpi JPGs resized from 600dpi PSDs created from the 600dpi TIFFs. I'm guessing 300dpi is not the resolution preferred here but as samples I've downloaded are not consistent I wanted to ask for the preferred image sizes for the archive.

The magazine is unique for its access to pop music stars of the time who were photographed next to coin-ops. In this issue you'll find Ted Nugent among others.

Let me know what I can do to finish up the work and hopefully add it to the Retromags community.

Chris

[Sean697]

This is great! Got to get someone with admin to the database to add this.

[RetroDefense]

I'm fairly certain this short-lived 'zine ran 5 issues. And yeah - with its CREEM roots - the magazine is a little nuts with music stars posing with arcade machines.

I'll let one of the admins give you the scan standard details - I have everything macro-ed and can't recall the details at the moment - but wanted to chime in and thank you for the preservation work!

[Sean697]

So I checked this out. The scans look really good. As far as cropping. What needs to be done is to resize them to 1600 pixels wide. Also do a little cleanup with dust removal. And do a little color correction. You can do this yourself, or someone here can volunteer. Shouldn't be that much work. As is the scans are like 6M each. The guides for editing are back up on the site fron page under the guides. That should take care of most of your questions.

[VGBounceHouse]

Hey Sean697,

Thanks for the information, I noticed the other topic that the guides were back but thanks for clarifying about the image size.

If someone wants to give me Photoshop levels I'd be happy to do color correction. The problem for me is that the "traditional" method (find the whitest white and blackest black, mess with the center) produces too "clean" of a copy (and negates the need to run dust removal more or less). I'd hate to contribute something oversaturated. If there is a volunteer I'd be happy to put up links to four or five of the TIFF scans to work from in determining the levels and then I could batch the rest.

If left up to me I will try to produce some samples for you guys to evaluate using various level adjustments and based on feedback do the batch. I'm just leery of my own eyes looking at the adjusted colors (particularly how easy it is to make the purple in this magazine "pop") which is why I stuck to straightening and artifact cleanup.

Chris

[Sean697]

Hey Sean697,

Thanks for the information, I noticed the other topic that the guides were back but thanks for clarifying about the image size.

If someone wants to give me Photoshop levels I'd be happy to do color correction. The problem for me is that the "traditional" method (find the whitest white and blackest black, mess with the center) produces too "clean" of a copy (and negates the need to run dust removal more or less). I'd hate to contribute something oversaturated. If there is a volunteer I'd be happy to put up links to four or five of the TIFF scans to work from in determining the levels and then I could batch the rest.

If left up to me I will try to produce some samples for you guys to evaluate using various level adjustments and based on feedback do the batch. I'm just leery of my own eyes looking at the adjusted colors (particularly how easy it is to make the purple in this magazine "pop") which is why I stuck to straightening and artifact cleanup.

Chris

With the size of your Jpegs, I really wouldn't worry about going to tiffs. They look fine already. I'd just work with the Jpegs you have.

[VGBounceHouse]

I've made a similar update to this scan as with the one for the issue of Video Games in my work-in-progress thread:

http://vgpavilion.com/mags/1982/09/vidiot/

Updated archive to better serve facing pages

Added text-searchable PDF version

8 examples of applying the site's guide for levels, brightness and sharpening displayed using a splitter for before and after view.

One example of the effect:

Please let me know if the altered versions are preferable and I will batch rescale to 201dpi (produces 1600px width) and apply the effects to create a new archive for upload here.

Chris

[Sean697]

Those color adjustments look really good on my iPad for the cover. Also in Photoshop it's easy to just make a macro resize image to 1600 pixels wide and assign it a key. They hit all you images up real fast. I don't know what the magazine looks like in person but it looked nice on the comparison. Much better than original.

[VGBounceHouse]

Thanks Sean697! I decided to just dive in after I corrected a few more facing pages issues and ran the full contribution process with my usual screw up.

In the Cover Gallery I forgot to remove the page number on the title so that is displaying incorrectly. With no way to edit the name someone else will have to do it.

I think I did the page edit properly. I am still linking to my own site for the download, a site moderator is welcome to copy the file and place it in a location you'd prefer. I don't have any download/upload limits but I'm sure my site isn't as fast as other locations.

Let me know if all is well and I'll do the same for the Video Games issue and then move on to the next project.

Chris

[Sean697]

Thanks Sean697! I decided to just dive in after I corrected a few more facing pages issues and ran the full contribution process with my usual screw up.

In the Cover Gallery I forgot to remove the page number on the title so that is displaying incorrectly. With no way to edit the name someone else will have to do it.

I think I did the page edit properly. I am still linking to my own site for the download, a site moderator is welcome to copy the file and place it in a location you'd prefer. I don't have any download/upload limits but I'm sure my site isn't as fast as other locations.

Let me know if all is well and I'll do the same for the Video Games issue and then move on to the next project.

Chris

IM phillymman or eday with you final submissions and the can get it up.

[E-Day]

Since I need to wait to hear back from Phillyman before I can upload the last two guides, I will paste the portion of the editing guide dealing with resizing. While I used to resize based on width, it was brought to my attention that it's better to go by height so that pages will have the same height if viewed side-by-side instead of being mismatched.

Resizing and Saving

This is the easy part. We'll make another Action that will save the edited TIF, resize the image, and then save it as a JPG.

The general standard dimensions for a scan is 2100 pixels high, or 2200 pixels tall if that gets the width of your pages closer to 1600 pixels wide. However, with screens having higher and higher pixel density, it's a good idea to also save a copy of your scans at full size; generally that's about 3200 pixels high. It is up to you if you submit a standard sized scan, or a full sized one. A full sized scan will have a significantly lager file size than a standard sized one. This portion will assume you will save both versions for future proofing. Skip the parts that do not apply to you.

In whatever folder your scans are in, make two new folders: one called 2100 (or 2200), and one called Full. In Photoshop, create a new Action called Save and set the Function key to F4. The Action should now be recording.

Go to Image > Image Size. Here, we are going to change the width of the image. Whatever the height of your file is, reduce it by one pixel, or more if you want it to be a round number. In this example the height is being changed to 3200.

Now you have an image almost the size of the original scan. The next step is to save the image as a JPG. Go to File > Save As; go into the Full folder you created, and pick JPG as the format from the drop down menu. Click Save and the JPEG Options window will pop up. Set the Quality to 9, and select Baseline ("Standard") under Format Options, and hit OK.

With the Action still recording, go to Edit > Image Size again, and change the height to 2100 pixels (or 2200). Hit OK. Next, go to File > Save As and navigate to the folder named 2100 (or 2200) and save the file with e same settings as before.

After than, hit CTRL+W to Close the file, and then stop recording.

[VGBounceHouse]

Thanks for that E-Day. I will re-process my source files. Two follow-up questions and I think I'll be set in the future:

1) in my work-in-progress thread marktrade mentioned keeping the dpi of the file at 300 regardless of the resizing dimensions. I don't understand why this would be done as the whole point of dpi is to compute the dimensions in inches which would no longer be accurate. Would not calculating the proper dpi to achieve the height be preferable?

2) in regard to two versions, how is this handled using the current database front-end? When I went to edit Vidiot Issue 1 there were a number of download link areas but nothing to differentiate 2100/2200 and full.

The general standard dimensions for a scan is 2100 pixels high, or 2200 pixels tall if that gets the width of your pages closer to 1600 pixels wide. However, with screens having higher and higher pixel density, it's a good idea to also save a copy of your scans at full size; generally that's about 3200 pixels high. It is up to you if you submit a standard sized scan, or a full sized one. A full sized scan will have a significantly lager file size than a standard sized one. This portion will assume you will save both versions for future proofing. Skip the parts that do not apply to you.

My target was always 300dpi which all of my work-in-progress downloads were set to. In this updated guide scenario would I be sharing two different versions? How is this handled by the database editor form?

The current linked CBR file for this issue is 50% bigger at 300dpi compared to 201dpi (which comes out as 1600x2174pixels scaling to height, I can't get an even dpi value to get 2100 or 2200 height). This is another thing that links my two questions. Perhaps the download links could specify the dpi of the images, and instead of hard pixel limits you switch to dpi scaling system since that is always the root of the scan. In this example 200dpi (a round number) produces 1592x2163 which is still interpreted with the proper inches compared to scaling to 300dpi then manually overriding the height in a second resize which produces a page size 75% or so of what it really is.

Chris

[Sean697]

I think he was just saying make a higher quality scan to save for future use. I mean if you really wanted to you could save the original TIFF files. That's what I'm doing. So if in the future the site says the new standard allows for better image quality. You can easily repackage and upload a replacement. Rather than have someone scan a whole new copy. I believe this has been an issue pointed out lately that many of the older scans are in lower quality, and could use a new scan. Had the scanner held onto the source scans this would be a non issue. So future proofing basically.

[Sean697]

Oh and DPI and resolution really are irrelevant for stuff being displayed on an electronic device. DPI is mainly used in some publishing programs for having to print out images. For example I had to print out an image for a large format poster and had to convert to 300 dpi for the large format printer. Even though my image was much much larger.

So I am guessing, leaving the dpi setting is still relevant for PDFs since they are designed to be printed out? Anyway, anything program that display an image in actual print size will look at dpi to determine that. But most just take the resolution and scale it to fit the screen. I hope that clears it up a bit.

[marktrade]

It may help to read the thread where I had this conversation with E-Day and kiwiarcader:

http://community.retromags.com/topic/9877-my-first-magazine-scan/

They said DPI settings affected their ability to zoom in with their tablets. Desktop software lets you zoom in on pixels to an arbitrarily large percentage but tablet software limits the zoom level by DPI.

In that thread I also recognize the value in scanning at very high resolution, even as high as 1200 DPI. Some higher quality magazine text is printed at 2400 DPI. Of course it's not necessary to ever scan that high, but there are benefits to scanning higher than 300 DPI, and I think those benefits will be appreciated as very high resolution retina-display tablets become standard and people want to zoom in on text.

I should note that text sizes are largest in the more popular magazines on Retromags like EGM and GamePro, so the limit to what is reasonable is hit a lot sooner with those. The Retromags guide as it is seems to reflect that particular source material.

I scan everything at 600 DPI, edit them uncompressed, publish some lower res versions, and then convert the high resolution files to PNG for archiving. Any lossless compression is fine. TIFFs allow for several different kinds of compression but PNG seems simpler and more convenient for me. I can just do it right from a contextual menu.

[Sean697]

Ultimately the dpi is only relevant when printing an image. You can change the dpi without changing the resolution to specify printing sizes. Over the years the term has been fairly irrelevant. Resolution really matters most. If you scan in 300 dpi or greater. You really should just be going to target resolution. As 300 dpi is usually much larger file size than what you are targeting.

Or more simply don't mess with the dpi you scan in. Resize the image resolution. Most programs resize to fit. If your in a program that has an option to view actual size. It will take the image dpi and your monitors dpi and display it as actual size on your screen. So 9 inches of your file is 9 inches on your screen etc.

[VGBounceHouse]

Thanks for the additional information, particularly that other thread as it seems to confirm a misunderstanding about what DPI is and why it is important for preservation.

I have been a publisher myself over the years including three games-or-game-related magazines:

This one was even distributed at COMDEX in 1989 and as far as I know was the biggest Amiga magazine ever if you only account for non-ad pages.

When an application is based on standard units like inches, which Adobe Acrobat is, the DPI is used to compute the width and height of the pages. If the user decides to print this will determine the amount of the physical page that will serve as the print area. Since we're in the wonderful world of computers we have options: when creating a PDF we could specify standard Letter (8.5"x11") and when importing images Acrobat will proportionately scale them to fit the page dimension. But you also have the option to use the DPI to calculate the page size, so a wide magazine like Game Informer or PLAY might be 9.5"x10.75" and you want to maintain that ratio. All of this is moot on screen, and even in print Acrobat can be told to "fill" the destination paper as much as it can. In the case of those wider magazines you end up with extra white space at the top and the bottom.

Let's do an example where we leave the DPI at 300 but force the height in a resize. I chose the December 1994 EGM as the example since it is close to standard 8.5"x11". At 600dpi 8.3"x10.8" it's 4980x6480pixel, scaled to 300dpi it's 2490x3240pixels. If I choose 2100pixels heigh for the final Retromags scaling I get 1614x2100pixels. That produces a 5.38"x7" not an 8.3"x10.8" document, quite the difference, versus scaling to 200dpi which is 1660x2160pixels but remains 8.3"x10.8" to preserve the dimensions of the physical page.

I have tested Retromags files as well as mine on the only tablets I own, iPad 2, iPad 2 Air and Kindle Fire HDX, and have never found a usability difference. I readily admit I haven't tried all of the reader apps out there, but as a programmer I find it hard to believe they aren't just dealing with pixels on a pixel device as opposed to inches as a print-oriented application like Acrobat does.

Since I have unlimited storage I am keeping my source 600dpi TIFF scan, 600dpi PSD edit, 300dpi CBR and 300dpi-sourced PDF. I will happily produce whatever format is desirable here by the hosts of Retromags. It just seems that if preservation is part of the goal, the actual physical page dimensions are part of any preservation attempt so future readers know how big (or small) a magazine was in their hands. An issue of BLIP feels nothing like an issue of PLAY, and while it can safely be assumed few will look to what the dimensions of a magazine were, archivists are interested in such details.

If we're operating in a source world of physical dimensions, respecting that seems to be part of the final product which is why scaling to a DPI standard seems appropriate. If 300dpi produces files that on average people consider too big I humbly suggest 200dpi as the scale here as it gets closest to a 1600px width or 2100/2200px height for the majority of magazines.

Until we get to the UK mags which are taller while using the same width lol

Chris

[Sean697]

It does seem useful if your going to print it. Or you have a large monitor and want the page with no scaling to display exactly the same size as it was in real life. Basically your trying to preserve real life dimensions in the digital world.

So just testing in Photoshop. Changing the dpi changes the pixels while preserving the image size.

Changing the pixel dimensions changes the image size.

So if I change from 600dpi to 300 dpi my document width and length does not change. When I change the pixel dimensions, my document width changes.

So if you want to preserve the original page size, change the dpi size till your pixels are the desired dimensions.

But this method will not be very good at matching page dimensions evenly. If you had to crop more on one page than another. Then resize for pixels then It will change the image size.

The best solution to both would be to maybe find the dpi on your pages that closest approximates the target resolution.

I have an image from EGM 12 I'm editing now. It's 4997 by 6485. 600 dpi.

If change the dpi to 194, it has a pixel dimension of 1616 by 2097.

Then I could change the dpi of all my images to 194.

Then I Could resize all my images to exactly 2100 pixels high. In my image it change the dimensions from 8.328 X 10.808 to 8.341 X 10.825.

That way I'd have a scan very close to the original dimensions (within a couple 100 th of an inch) with the exact same pixel height.

[Sean697]

But honestly. Most people are viewing these on screens. So just changing the pixel size is adequate, That dpi don't matter till you have a target printer.

[marktrade]

If we're operating in a source world of physical dimensions, respecting that seems to be part of the final product which is why scaling to a DPI standard seems appropriate. If 300dpi produces files that on average people consider too big I humbly suggest 200dpi as the scale here as it gets closest to a 1600px width or 2100/2200px height for the majority of magazines.

That's an interesting suggestion. It would affect something like GMR, which has proportions that give it the appearance of an A3 format magazine but in reality is smaller than A4 at 8.2"x10.2", smaller than letter. Even though I still sympathize with Sean697 in that it doesn't matter, it doesn't affect me and how I view the files, I'll go along with it if it's an accepted community standard.

VR is coming up fast. There are people who are going to want to recreate the experience of reading magazines in a virtual environment. They will have expectations of size and proportion of magazines relative to each other as they pull them off their virtual bookshelves. I've been saving the bindings after I cut them off so I can scan them all later to assist in recreating magazines as virtual objects. Of course there's no hurry for that now but maybe this time next year people will be working on it, and the year after that it'll be fun, and the year after that it'll be preferred. Who knows?

Regardless, saving the original scans with the original DPI settings also preserves their physical measurements, so that's another value-added to saving originals, at the very least.

One more thing I just remembered, the dimensions of pages are not consistent for stapled mags, especially thick ones like Famitsu. The outer pages will be larger than the inner pages because they have to wrap around those inner pages. That's another reason why shooting for standard width just doesn't make sense. The outer pages can be progressively wider by almost half an inch.

[Sean697]

If you really wanted to have the same quality standards across all magazines. You would specify a dpi setting to scan too. Then resize all your pages to a standard height for the magazine size. Then of course larger magazines would have larger file sizes logically. So if you wanted everything to have the same quality settings. You could say scan everything in 200 dpi. Then resize every image to the nearest 10 pixel height to have even size pages. By specifying a standard height for all magazine sizes. Your really having smaller magazines look a little better and larger ones look a little worse.

[Sean697]

So the iPad pro coming out is very close to magazine size. The device is 12 X 8.68 with a Retina display of 2732x2038. I think 300 dpi is a higher resolution than this by far. So 300dpi target scan is ridiculous. Basically higher than your eyes could see at full size.

So I am ok with scanning high and reducing to a specified pixel dimension. But I would also be ok with setting a standard of 200 dpi and then resizing all you images to the same pixel height. Even that would produce more detailed scans than the site current has. The benefit is you would have the same image quality regardless of magazine size.

[E-Day]

You can adjust the height and width of an image without changing the dpi. My comment assumed you had scanned things at 300 dpi and were keeping them at 300 dpi. I was speaking strictly about the dimensions of the images. The important thing is how they appear on the screen. Unless you intend to reprint everything, having an image be 5.38"x7" shouldn't be an issue. Leaving eh scan at it's native dimensions, say 2372x3241 at 300dpi will give you an image that's the same height and width as the original print, about 8" by 10.8" inches in my example. This size will stay the same whether I up the dpi to 600 or lower it to 72. The height and width in pixels will change, by the dimension in inches will not.

While keeping a scan at it's original pixel dimensions is ideal, we do not have unlimited server space, nor do people have unlimited storage space on whatever they are reading these on. So lowering the dimensions to 2100 or 2200 pixels in height saves a significant amount of space, and when reading a scan on your screen, you won't really be able to tell the difference. We recommend 300 dpi at 2100 or 2200 pixels high, but you can release your scans larger if you want. And I also recommend automating Photoshop to save a copy of your scans at their original size for the day when the dimensions we use now are too small.

[Sean697]

In Photoshop on the image resize,if you change the dpi setting only, it will change the pixel dimensions, but keep the physical dimensions intact. If you change the pixels dimensions independently, it changes the physical size.

But I agree you can't tell the difference on you screen.mi did some test between 300 dpi and 600 dpi. You have to zoom in super far to see the difference. On the EGM 7 I just did. I zoomed in on the female characters lips. So they were prominent on the screen. The 600 dpi had slightly more detail on the lip lines. At viewing size it's impossible to tell the difference. At 1600 pixels wide you couldn't tell the difference.

[E-Day]

If you really wanted to have the same quality standards across all magazines. You would specify a dpi setting to scan too. Then resize all your pages to a standard height for the magazine size.

I did. I specified 300dpi in the scanning guide. And I also specify resizing by height in the new guide. I just have to get the guide up. I may put it up without the new photos just so the text is at least there.