I agree with your specific post, but I voted “no” to emphasis a wider point. Every scan he is doing is in this unfinished format. I don’t get why this isn’t seen a bad practice. It really isn’t that hard to crop something to fit. Yes, the quality is good. And I thank him for doing the scans. But spending an extra two minutes creating basic versions for general use seems sensible to me. And then it makes MUCH more sense to include his original as well for those people who then want to chase for colour perfection.
As @mmirG said in the comments - these scans are like having someone’s thumb in there. It will be as good as a watermark as if I see one pop up in my collection it will make me laugh as I’ll know exactly who created it.
I’ll be watching out to see if our collections overlap. If I find any of these items downloading for my music I’ll tell you what I’ll be doing. I’ll be taking a copy of that 20MB image, and then rotating, cropping, and uploading a JPG version for other community members to make use of. Allowing users a real choice.
That was, as far as I understand, @rdswift’s entire point: he uploads these (which are good enough for at least one of the uses of cover art in MB: proving release info), and anyone is more than welcome to crop them and upload a cropped version
I’m not sure whether we need the color reference or not (the point about it being for a specific copy at a specific moment in time makes sense to me and does make it different from, say, a painting in a museum) but there’s nothing wrong as such about this upload
I’m not at all against doing this, but it is abundantly clear to me that we need to come to some community consensus of what the specs for this “usable” (for tagging purposes) version should be (e.g.: file format, file size / resolution, degree of cropping, post processing such as healing of blemishes, brightness, contrast, color balance adjustments, etc.). I don’t mind terribly doing one, but doing multiple different versions to accommodate multiple different preferences is not something that I will consider.
Perhaps another thread to develop this “community consensus” is in order. I don’t plan on starting it. I hope that I’m wrong, but I think it will be a difficult (if not impossible) task to achieve such consensus. It seems that the whole topic of cover art is extremely divisive within the community.
As a random test I downloaded and cropped one of the images. I am on a fast city based broadband at 100Mbps. Made me giggle watching it. Reminded me of the days of dialup and it appeared row by row on the screen. It took 90 seconds to appear. It then took me 60 seconds to crop and save as a JPG version.
This is what I mean. Just spend a little more effort to upload usable versions and then everyone wins. (Note I says useable, not perfect) What is currently happening will mean people with non-city broadband will fail to download it. Can Picard even handle 20MB image files? Imagine if a Picard user loads up a dozen Blue Oyster Cult albums for tagging - Picard will freeze and take ages.
If he didn’t upload it at all, they would also have to go through to process of finding a copy of the release and scanning it themselves. I’d say he’s saving them at least one step regardless of how he uploads it.
If it’s more than 0 time units, then it’s more than you can reasonably ask of them. If you don’t think it takes any time at all, you are welcome to download and process the image and upload the “usable” (by taggers? whom? different audiences have different requirements) version. It is easy (or possible at least ) to derive all the various versions you want from @rdswift’s upload, but if he had “cleaned” it, it would be very limited what would be possible to derive from it.
Apart from some cropping-and-rotating directly in the scanning software, I’m uploading unedited scans (often of library copies, with library stickers and all). Scanning the cover art and uploading it is already adding a lot of time to my editing process, and I just don’t have the time energy to spend another .5–2 (or often up to about 5) minutes on each piece of uploaded cover art, I would probably just not do it. However, like @rdswift, I’d be happy to see other community members pick up my scans and turn them into more “usable” versions.
Also, this whole discussion reminds me a bit about:
Yes it can.
Picard has no limitation on image sizes by itself, but there are limitations due to audio file formats, and of course embedding a full set of 20MB images in an MP3 of 4MB doesn’t make much sense.
You can download and save full resolution images to storage devices though.
Also note that CAA provides smaller images (250px, 500px and, since few weeks, 1200 px thumbnails), and Picard is perfectly able to use those if asked too (which is recommended, if you embed images).
Back on the topic, limitations due to formats or applications shouldn’t be taken in account, if MB and CAA are able to manage those files, that’s enough.
Does everyone agree that a checkbox to indicate “For archive purposes” is a step forward?
This would separate CA with obvious borders, colour references, existing blemishes, rips, mold, water damage, sun fading, library stickers and photographs of CA viewed through scratched jewel cases with fingers in front of the lense, from “Display for pleasure” images.
And then some way for people to choose what sort/s of images Picard etc will dish up?
If that works for the community then:
3. How about we invite all CA uploaders to add a raw scan to the CAArchive as a “For archive purposes” image as well as any “Display for pleasure” image they are generous enough to create?
That seems to be the limit of low hanging fruit.
Beyond here are monsters?
I have often wanted this option. for scans I made that were… not so fantastic. I’ve scanned a whole lot of things but I haven’t had time to fix and upload them. it would be a boon also to be able to upload some things “as is” as well as “pretty” ones for tagging. this gets a +1 from me
The files you posted don’t seem to have a color profile, so I guess your scanner is not doing any color management at all. We probably don’t need to worry about switching off color management options for calibrating.
I suggest turning the brightness down to a point that allows you to capture the black and white fields in your IT8 target without clipping (i.e. no channel should bottom out at 0 or max out at 255) and make a scan of it.
There are a couple of free software solutions for generating color profiles. Are you using Windows or Mac OS?
I’m using a windows machine for my scanning. My scanner isn’t very high quality. It’s part of an all-in-one HP Photosmart C309a series. I just posted five test scans with various brightness settings on the scanner. Are any of these of use? Thanks.
Interesting. No highlights clipping here and only two squares are clipping in the shadows. Maybe you could fix this by decreasing the contrast a little
I created a profile using coca and my IT-8 target, installed it in GIMP and tried scanning again. The result is here. Hopefully it’s a bit better. Thanks for the help.
UPDATE: It seems that Gimp wasn’t including the profile in the file when I saved it. I updated to the latest version of Gimp which seems to have saved it properly. The image file can be found here.
If other editors want to see an example of cropping of CA that leads to loss of information and possible creation of duplicate Releases then please compare
with
Somehow, and maybe not through editor action, Mick’s pupil has disappeared, as has a section of his throat.
is credited as the source at
This cropping fits inside current MB guidelines on CA, as I understand things.
There seems also to be a change in colour - this also fits insides current guidelines as I understand them.
This shrinkage of CA is what having a visible border around the outside of the CA image helps prevent. We can’t even have much confidence that the discogs image hasn’t also been cut down.
And as far as “Display for pleasure” goes, I find the warmer tones of the cropped MB CA much nicer.
I have to chuckle a bit about this. Much of the (often heated) discussion surrounding “acceptable” cover art stems from personal preference. If two editors such as yourself and @mmirG, both knowledgeable in the area of graphic arts and digital image processing (I believe), can’t agree then what chance is there for the rest of us to come to a consensus on a definition of “acceptable” cover art? (Said with tongue firmly planted in cheek. )
Nice! But funny. It looks a little different from mine - and I was able to match your scan pretty rather well by creating a profile based on it. I wonder what these are supposed to look like…
What do your covers look like with the current scanner settings? Did you manage to get rid of the clipping there as well?
I think the clipping is corrected there as well. Here is a sample scan of the back cover of a booklet. Looks a lot better than the original scans did.
I may still need to do a bit of playing around with it, because mine still looks a bit washed out in the A13 to A19 blocks compared with yours. Still a great improvement from before. Thanks for your help with this.
Every point discussed here has come up in the past, it’s good to see it come up again
My thoughts:
I don’t think images in the CAA can be too big, as they can always be made smaller (but not the other way round…). However 500x500 as the largest auto-resized size does not leave any middle ground for those who want big art, but not archival art. A larger auto resize (or two) would be really good. It would also encourage people to upload higher quality art to reach the ‘max’ auto size, be it 1000x1000, or 2500x2500 or whatever, without having to open the original to get an idea of how big the picture is.
It is MB’s policy that if the data is an improvement, even if it’s not perfect, we vote yes. These images are an improvement, and don’t break any rules, even though I would prefer them cropped (note: I have spent a few hours cropping rdswifts uploads in the past so I know what’s involved, but quality scans are still appreciated). If he wants to do the wider community a favour and crop them then that would be awesome, but again, not required.
A ‘work needed’ or ‘raw’ toggle has been suggested in the past, and I’m actually pretty happy that such an extreme example has come to light to perhaps push it through. I think it would encourage more people to scan images, and others to take up editing images.
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