Hello, I’m pretty new to Music Brainz (My account has some months, but still really new at editing). I recently added a release, here: https://musicbrainz.org/release/1aacf992-8d3a-49e6-8371-8bdcad1baa08 (Feel free to vote and edit anything I may have gotten wrong, would be much appreciated), the only other release on the group was a Digital Release with no Cover Art, so I decided to add my own, but I had some difficulties:
To sum it up into a short question, What is acceptable when talking about a scan?
-
Color correction: I didn’t correct the cover because I don’t have a professionally calibrated display, I’m not versed in the art of image editing (using the guide to add cover arts was my first real use of GIMP) and the only way I tried to correct without destroying it was saturating, which I ended up leaving since it still didn’t look quite right in my eyes.
The question is: should I still have saturated, even a little bit if it meant it was closer to the real cover? What if it was a tad exaggerated but still closer to it? Is no color correction at all acceptable? -
Cropping: While trying to crop another cover art, I realized that while trying to crop white space from the scanning, I was also cropping a little bit from 2 sides, like 3 or 4 pixels, but the top part was aligned.
How much cropping is too much? Should I scan it until everything is almost perfectly squared and then start cutting? -
Editing imperfections: I was using the recommended resynthesize plugin, I was using it to remove dirt from the images, but at one point I noticed it had a finger marks, they were quite big but I managed to edit out much of them, but I came to the question, how much editing is too much? Is removing print imperfections ok? Copy-pasting a part of the cover ok if its not noticeable? (For example: I tried to remove a finger mark by copying a black part of the cover and putting it over because they were part of the same zone) Should I try to edit out reflections that may come from the scanner?
-
The art source: If for a release group, someone uses the digital image, like, instead of scanning someone took it from here for example: https://mora.jp/package/43000152/LACA-9932_HI-24_48/ (maybe somewhere with higher resolution), is it acceptable to use them for physical releases? Should we prefer scans for the physical even if they are the same? Or only if we can get higher resolutions?
Another question related to adding art, sorry if it belongs to another topic, I’ll create a new one if its the case: Should I add any bonus that comes with buying a CD, but not necessarily in the case? Like a standee, an acrylic, a plastic poster, postcards, etc.
And a last question, Should I only add the raw and wait until someone edits it correctly? Or is it okay to add one maybe not really well edited, but at a high enough quality?
Sorry for this long series questions, thank you for any input.