I’ve stumbled upon How to Scan Cover Art page in the documentation. And it incentivizes to use Resynthesizer plugin to: “repair bits of dirt, dust, small damage etc”.
But Cover Art says the opposite: “Any fan-made or edited artwork is not to be uploaded to any release”
“This includes any form of alteration to the positioning of graphical elements within the image (such as advisory, hype or point of sale stickers), as well as “image improvements” such as upscaling a small image using an AI tool.”
I think the intent is to add graphics that are as accurate as possible to the actual cover art. Cloning out "bits of dirt, dust, small damage, etc.” serves that purpose, as those things aren’t part of the original image. I would include the correction of scanning inaccuracies as well. For example, my scanner tends to over-saturate the colors when I scan a cover, so when I edit the image I tone down the saturation until it looks as close as possible to the actual artwork. I’ve seen many scans where the scanner did a poor job in color matching. I would accept color correction in those cases.
But repositioning graphical elements changes the actual image. Upscaling images causes pixelation, which is undesirable.
I remember a few years back, someone tried to upload a “reconstructed” cover for a release of “Grease.” You can see the differences, like the untextured background, and the cartoonish pencil. This goes too far, IMO.
That recon reconstructed Grease cover is awful. It has even trimmed her nails!!
I’ll use a clone tool to do this by hand. Example being that annoying hair that was on the scanner. It is not part of the image. Tweaking colours a bit, but nothing drastic.
Be careful of plugins that can “over correct”. I saw someone using an appalling AI tool that would “correct” his CDs so much they didn’t even have a circular hole in the middle any more.
We are uploading images to help in recognising an album. We are not uploading images for tagging. Don’t improve the image, just improve the photograph\scan.
There are so many changes in there it would be quicker to list what didn’t change. Even the trees in the background have been cut down and changed to blue sky…
Well, you don’t know exactly what was below a stain, if you remove it digitally with software.
You’re creating a new spot, with the colour of the surroundings.
A stain replaced by a cloned estimate is better than those who just put a censored black square. The human eye and brain combo can usually do a pretty decent patchup job. Especially compared with AI.
