First and foremost...calibrate your equiptment. It won't do you much good to go through the painstaking process of scanning and then postprocessing your images if your monitor isn't displaying colors properly. You may think your images look fine but on other user's and the screene'rs monitors what you think of as green may in fact look blue to them.

I use the Spyder2 Pro by ColorVision to calibrate my Samsung SyncMaster 931B Digital Flat Panel LCD every 2 weeks...whether it needs it or not. When the Spyder completes the calibration process it creates an ICC profile and automatically loads it into the memory of my graphics card, scanner and Adobe Photoshop CS2. This ensures that what I scan is what I see is what I process is what I contribute and finally what you see.

I scan my covers as .tif at 600dpi using an Epson Perfection 2400. In Photoshop I will adjust levels if needed then apply an Unsharp Mask usually of 100, sometimes less, with a radius of between 2.0-5.0 pixels. I then crop the borders with perspective to straighten the image. Then I will use the clone tool to eliminate any dust specks and scratches. This process takes the longest depending on the condition of the cover being worked on. After that, and I'm satisfied with the results, I'll save the 600dpi image as an uncommressed tif. Then I will resize the image to 500x700+/- for contributing to Invelos and "save as" using the file name for the image (front or back) used in Profiler in the proper directory. After contributing the images I then go back into Photoshop, open the original tifs again and resize them to 800x1240+/- and "save as" again for my local database and for uploading to my phpDVDprofiler web site. This process can take anywhere from 1-3 hours per image set depending on their condition.