Quoting Dr Pavlov:

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Steve:

I don't agree with Cliff. I recognize his many years in the printing business, but the fact remains is that eyes cannot calibrated. He sees things differently than the martian and i see things diferently from you.The only way we could really create a truly accurate representation of a cover is if we had some sort of notes from those that produced the cover  and i mean specific notes.

The same is to som edegree when "tuning" a house for Audio, no two ears perceive sound the same way, some owners prefer the sound to be brighter, some like deeper bass and so forth.

We could have this same argument over restored films. Sometimes the restoration team has specific notes as to how the film was to appear and the color base and so forth. I think the current version of GWTW is absolutely gorgeous, however I could argue as well that GWTW is not representative of the original film on one basis alone, the original Technicolor negatives were out of registration by FIVE pixels, this was corrected several years ago which resulted in literally a picture which had never been seen before, let alone in 1939, and presented the sharpest and clearest image ever seen of this classic film.

The biggest problem I see in images are images with have bad black levels, or have they brightness levels turned up to the point that the image looks as though it has been smeared with milk and so forth. The biggest problem I see with colors are usually in the reds and the blues, with a tendency to (by my eyes) to sometimes weaken the reds to the point where they are very weak or almost pastel and in blues and bent towards the violet end of the blue spectrum.

But Like i said, I recognize with my years in home theater installation that sound and colors are both highly subjective in both Audio and Color setups, dependent upon the eyes of thehome owner, not the installing technician, and i have seldom if ever seen these differences to major, they are usually very subtle. I think we have all seen what happens when one of the primarys goes out on a color...I have NEVER had a customer that he liked his image that green for example, or that they liked their registration to be out so far that it looked like you were watching a 3D image without glasses.  So many times you really are spitting hairs and you can't calibrate the human visual or audio tools, everyone is going to be different and we won't have access to the notes from the creative eyes that generated a given cover to tell us exactly which colors he used, or which other settings he used in creating the cover. We can only do the very best we can, and like others I sometimes hold the ACTUAL up next to the image, but that is no guarantee that i perceive the cover the same way as the Contributor. I give as detailed voting notes as I can in the limited space I have to try and describe any shortcomings I might perceive in a given cover.

Skip

But that's have the problem, if everybody had to use just the scanning abilities of DVDP and NOT use Photoshop etc then it wouldn't matter if your eyes saw different red levels to mine or Cliff's or Hal's or (insert name here). Yes I agree that at times dust spot etc might require cleaning up, as for Forget's "An image might need straightening" DVDP can already do this:- "Rotate by Arbitrary Angle" part of the Image submenu in Edit Cover Images screen - Edit Cover Image - Image> Crop: Resize: Rotate.
But then if the original image is placed in the scanner correctly, the scan would come out at the correct angle to start with.

As Cliff has stated and many of you have also said one persons perception of what is a good image (because they have adjusted the contrast, black levels, white levels etc) is not necessarily what everybody sees, whereas an image as perceived by DVDP for the online would be like all other data used for the online:- A starting point for your local DB. So therefore the online DB should represent the cover as it stands on the Shop shelf, The same as everybody sees, not what Tom, Dick or Harry says they think is better because…

Steve

Quoting Kathy:

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If, in my opinion, the scans are better I immediately copy them and put them in my database. I don't want to take a chance that the screeners don't agree with me and they are declined.

That's a good suggestion! I think I'll start doing that too since it has happened on rare occasions that I missed a better cover (in my opinion) because it was denied by the screeners, in most cases due to the contribution not having enough detailed explanation on what's improved about the cover. Thanks for the suggestion.

I'd also like to add that for some covers, it's virtually impossible to reproduce the exact same cover on-screen than what I hold in my hand. I'm speaking out of experience here, as I must've scanned, rescanned and tried to fix the Death Note Blu-ray covers over 20 times and still didn't get good results due to their reflective nature. I even went as far as to use transparent plastic sheets on my scanner bed just to fracture the reflected light and get better results. Some kind members then helped me to improve the colour balance in photoshop. The results, which are now in the online, are much, much better than what I first had but aren't still a 100% faithful reproduction of the original, rather a close approximation. I think in those few cases, we just need to go with the best possible result we can get. I'm mostly having trouble scanning:
- reflective covers (especially if there's reflective silver in them, as it often turn to a very dark tone)
- hologram covers (Someone managed to get a beautiful Fringe Blu-ray cover scan whereas I just kept failing and gave up after seeing his/her great results)

I pretty much follow what Kathy, snarbo and Katatonia do. I keep every image in my collection locked so I don't inadvertently replace one I didn't mean to. Very few of the images in my collection are not touched-up in some way. And as with all things in DVDP, my local is what I want. I love the online as an excellent starting point as it gives me lots to do...following the rules of course. Just think of the fun we'll have when 3.6 goes live and we get to do it all over again. WoHo! I'm not being sarcastic, so don't start flaming me.

Quoting bigdaddyhorse:

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Quoting Taro:

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I'd also like to add that for some covers, it's virtually impossible to reproduce the exact same cover on-screen than what I hold in my hand.

Besides the silvers and holograms you mention, there's also a few shades of colors that just will not read by any scanner appartently. Tales from the Cyrpt season 7 had this with an orange reading red. Some colors just don't scan, esp. greens and purples I've noticed.

I tried to improve the cover scans of the Canadian locality of The Girl Next Door a couple of weeks ago while doing a full audit on the profile. The title is written in fluorescent orange...  It absolutely will not scan properly, no matter what I tried. It always came up this pale pink color...    Pain in the butt. I finally gave up.

I wanted to say in this thread though, that I’m against just simply scanning in a cover and submitting it as has been noted by a few posters. None of this “my eye captures reds differently than your eye” stuff, because to me, that isn’t a problem. I’m good with that and realize that sometimes things can be slightly different and still appear to be basically correct. However, with just scanning and no adjustments, I’ve found covers get completely washed out. The light from the scanner is only a few centimeters away from the cover… a very bright light. Anything is going to look different than it actually does when it’s placed up against a light that bright. It totally washes out the finer more subtle colors on covers (I noticed it with light clouds on a light blue background recently… the clouds basically disappeared), it makes blacks light, and yes, I’ve noticed the sharpness from the actual cover can absolutely be reduced in a scan. Not to mention the surface dust from your scanner being caught in the scan as well.

I always adjust the exposure and most of the time that adaptive lighting as well (as the scan can wash out some finer shadows on a cover). Generally I increase the sharpness a little bit too (I scan in my covers very large and the program automatically resizes them, so the sharpness gets brought down a notch when that happens… increasing the sharpness counter acts the resizing the loss of sharpness). I then, like a lot of other people, hold the dvd up against my computer screen to compare. If they match, I submit, if they don’t, I tinker then submit. If I can’t get them to match, I swear, throw things, cry, curl up in a ball and then move on… 

I think that just scanning in a cover and submitting is a bad idea. It’ll lead to a database of washed out, blurry covers.

Just my two cents though.