Comments & Questions About Book Illustrations
Hi; Obviously, I'm new here. I realize that the Project is mainly text driven, but... I down loaded Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales edition with Edmund Dulac's illustrations-after jumping around the room in joyful glee-then realized that the dpi on the images isn't high enough to print them out, with the rest of the book. At least, not very well. Then, the images-or scans of them-were so dark that you can't even really see them. I'm assuming that that's mainly due to the age of the book. Anyway, I took the liberty of working with the illos a little... I lightened them a little, so they were viewable, and placed them in a folder in my computer, leaving the original image file in the ebook folder alone. I'm more than happy to send these lightened images to someone, to see if they want to re-place the exsisting image file in the ebook with THIS file. They aren't any higher dpi ofcourse, but at least people will be able to see them. But if there is an interest, I need to know who as well as how to send them. My question is this... why aren't the images higher res? I realize it would take up more space, but it would be wonderful to be able to have good quality illos to go along with the text. But then, besides being a reader, I'm a visual artist myself. But it would be wonderful, especially given the fact that so much of this artwork is completly inaccessable to the public, or if available in poster/print form, its anywhere from $45-$80 or more for a small reproduction, and this is work thats in the public domain! Anyway, sorry about the rant. Leigh --------------------------------- Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2¢/min or less.
Current policy on DP books[1] is to have high-resolution scans of the illustrations archived along with the projects.. they will eventually be made available for people to use. Keep in mind raw scans are extremely expensive in terms of disk space/bandwidth.. a mildly graphics heavy book can easily hit 200-300 megs, while a book with a lot of color plates can easily exceed several gigabytes. (Before descreening, etc. I scan all illos at 600 DPI as PNGs; after descreening and downscaling to 300 DPI the size drops dramatically.) R C [1] Not sure when it went into effect. Probably sometime after the Project Manager/Post Processor jobs were split. On 7/8/06, Jacqulyn Perry <urbangleaner56@yahoo.com> wrote:
Hi; Obviously, I'm new here. I realize that the Project is mainly text driven, but... I down loaded Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales edition with Edmund Dulac's illustrations-after jumping around the room in joyful glee-then realized that the dpi on the images isn't high enough to print them out, with the rest of the book. At least, not very well. Then, the images-or scans of them-were so dark that you can't even really see them. I'm assuming that that's mainly due to the age of the book. Anyway, I took the liberty of working with the illos a little... I lightened them a little, so they were viewable, and placed them in a folder in my computer, leaving the original image file in the ebook folder alone. I'm more than happy to send these lightened images to someone, to see if they want to re-place the exsisting image file in the ebook with THIS file. They aren't any higher dpi ofcourse, but at least people will be able to see them. But if there is an interest, I need to know who as well as how to send them.
My question is this... why aren't the images higher res? I realize it would take up more space, but it would be wonderful to be able to have good quality illos to go along with the text. But then, besides being a reader, I'm a visual artist myself. But it would be wonderful, especially given the fact that so much of this artwork is completly inaccessable to the public, or if available in poster/print form, its anywhere from $45-$80 or more for a small reproduction, and this is work thats in the public domain!
Anyway, sorry about the rant. Leigh
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Okay, that makes sense... would the powers that be want to take a looksee at the image file of 'lightened' images? Leigh Robert Cicconetti <grythumn@gmail.com> wrote: Current policy on DP books[1] is to have high-resolution scans of the illustrations archived along with the projects.. they will eventually be made available for people to use. Keep in mind raw scans are extremely expensive in terms of disk space/bandwidth.. a mildly graphics heavy book can easily hit 200-300 megs, while a book with a lot of color plates can easily exceed several gigabytes. (Before descreening, etc. I scan all illos at 600 DPI as PNGs; after descreening and downscaling to 300 DPI the size drops dramatically.) R C [1] Not sure when it went into effect. Probably sometime after the Project Manager/Post Processor jobs were split. On 7/8/06, Jacqulyn Perry <urbangleaner56@yahoo.com> wrote: Hi; Obviously, I'm new here. I realize that the Project is mainly text driven, but... I down loaded Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales edition with Edmund Dulac's illustrations-after jumping around the room in joyful glee-then realized that the dpi on the images isn't high enough to print them out, with the rest of the book. At least, not very well. Then, the images-or scans of them-were so dark that you can't even really see them. I'm assuming that that's mainly due to the age of the book. Anyway, I took the liberty of working with the illos a little... I lightened them a little, so they were viewable, and placed them in a folder in my computer, leaving the original image file in the ebook folder alone. I'm more than happy to send these lightened images to someone, to see if they want to re-place the exsisting image file in the ebook with THIS file. They aren't any higher dpi ofcourse, but at least people will be able to see them. But if there is an interest, I need to know who as well as how to send them. My question is this... why aren't the images higher res? I realize it would take up more space, but it would be wonderful to be able to have good quality illos to go along with the text. But then, besides being a reader, I'm a visual artist myself. But it would be wonderful, especially given the fact that so much of this artwork is completly inaccessable to the public, or if available in poster/print form, its anywhere from $45-$80 or more for a small reproduction, and this is work thats in the public domain! Anyway, sorry about the rant. Leigh --------------------------------- Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2¢/min or less. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d --------------------------------- Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Make PC-to-Phone Calls to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2¢/min or less.
Hi Leigh. Thanks for sharing your ideas. I suppose an answer for your question is that, as you mention, PG is "mainly text driven". For a general user, images are needed that are accessible for download over a non-high-speed connection. Also, we need to remember that, in these cases, how the images are prepared is up to each individual volunteer. I find dealing with images a pain, because unlike the relatively straight-forward text, there are so many variables in digatizing images. I'm now leaning towards transcribing this picture book using reduced-size jpgs (averaging 375 by 530 pixels) that will hopefully make for a smoothly loading html file for most users. Then, I'll include ziped hi-res page images for the occasional person who might want them. Andrew On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Jacqulyn Perry wrote:
Hi; Obviously, I'm new here. I realize that the Project is mainly text driven, but... I down loaded Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales edition with Edmund Dulac's illustrations-after jumping around the room in joyful glee-then realized that the dpi on the images isn't high enough to print them out, with the rest of the book. At least, not very well. Then, the images-or scans of them-were so dark that you can't even really see them. I'm assuming that that's mainly due to the age of the book. Anyway, I took the liberty of working with the illos a little... I lightened them a little, so they were viewable, and placed them in a folder in my computer, leaving the original image file in the ebook folder alone. I'm more than happy to send these lightened images to someone, to see if they want to re-place the exsisting image file in the ebook with THIS file. They aren't any higher dpi ofcourse, but at least people will be able to see them. But if there is an interest, I need to know who as well as how to send them.
My question is this... why aren't the images higher res? I realize it would take up more space, but it would be wonderful to be able to have good quality illos to go along with the text. But then, besides being a reader, I'm a visual artist myself. But it would be wonderful, especially given the fact that so much of this artwork is completly inaccessable to the public, or if available in poster/print form, its anywhere from $45-$80 or more for a small reproduction, and this is work thats in the public domain!
Anyway, sorry about the rant. Leigh
Hi Andrew! That sounds like a great idea, and a sensible compromise! Is there a way I could help with this? I'm not sure HOW I could help, I don't have access to the books, as I seriously doubt I could get my hands on a copy of any of these books-most are collectors items and way outside my budget. In the meantime, I still have the re-worked images I mentioned, which I would very much like to pass on to you or whomever. They are the same ones in the original file, just re-worked a little so you can actually see them, rather than a dark blur. Leigh Andrew Sly <sly@victoria.tc.ca> wrote: Hi Leigh. Thanks for sharing your ideas. I suppose an answer for your question is that, as you mention, PG is "mainly text driven". For a general user, images are needed that are accessible for download over a non-high-speed connection. Also, we need to remember that, in these cases, how the images are prepared is up to each individual volunteer. I find dealing with images a pain, because unlike the relatively straight-forward text, there are so many variables in digatizing images. I'm now leaning towards transcribing this picture book using reduced-size jpgs (averaging 375 by 530 pixels) that will hopefully make for a smoothly loading html file for most users. Then, I'll include ziped hi-res page images for the occasional person who might want them. Andrew On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Jacqulyn Perry wrote:
Hi; Obviously, I'm new here. I realize that the Project is mainly text driven, but... I down loaded Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales edition with Edmund Dulac's illustrations-after jumping around the room in joyful glee-then realized that the dpi on the images isn't high enough to print them out, with the rest of the book. At least, not very well. Then, the images-or scans of them-were so dark that you can't even really see them. I'm assuming that that's mainly due to the age of the book. Anyway, I took the liberty of working with the illos a little... I lightened them a little, so they were viewable, and placed them in a folder in my computer, leaving the original image file in the ebook folder alone. I'm more than happy to send these lightened images to someone, to see if they want to re-place the exsisting image file in the ebook with THIS file. They aren't any higher dpi ofcourse, but at least people will be able to see them. But if there is an interest, I need to know who as well as how to send them.
My question is this... why aren't the images higher res? I realize it would take up more space, but it would be wonderful to be able to have good quality illos to go along with the text. But then, besides being a reader, I'm a visual artist myself. But it would be wonderful, especially given the fact that so much of this artwork is completly inaccessable to the public, or if available in poster/print form, its anywhere from $45-$80 or more for a small reproduction, and this is work thats in the public domain!
Anyway, sorry about the rant. Leigh
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Leigh: How accomplished are you as editing images? If you'd like to help with this particular item I have underway, one image could use a small clean-up where there seems to be a smudge of blue ink. Take a look at http://www.victoria.tc.ca/~sly/pb.htm (See the first "alphabet" image, on the baby's forehead.) This is beyond what I feel comfortable dealing with. If you are interested, I have a 1.4mb png file that I would request to have edited and returned in the same format. Or, were you asking in a more general point of view? By far the easiest way for a new volunteer to contribute to Project Gutenberg is to sign up at Distributed Proofreaders (pgdp.net) and help with one page at a time. And about your re-worked images, it would be best to ask one of the white-washers, (people who actually post files). Perhaps via errata [at] pglaf.org. In that case, please include more full details, such as PG number of the ebook. In this case, I can predict that a likely response would be that lightened images would be welcome if you can make them from an original source. In the case at hand the files included are jpgs. Jpgs use a lossy compression, which means that each time you save them, some information is lost. So if you take a jpg, edit it and save it again, you are probably going to have a file which is both larger in size and poorer in quality than what you started with. If you really want to perserver on this text, you could then try to contact whoever prepared this text and ask if high-resolution images are availible you could work from. (And all of this provides a good argument why I'd like to preserve hi-res images somewhere for the text I'm working on.) Andrew On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Jacqulyn Perry wrote:
Hi Andrew! That sounds like a great idea, and a sensible compromise! Is there a way I could help with this? I'm not sure HOW I could help, I don't have access to the books, as I seriously doubt I could get my hands on a copy of any of these books-most are collectors items and way outside my budget.
In the meantime, I still have the re-worked images I mentioned, which I would very much like to pass on to you or whomever. They are the same ones in the original file, just re-worked a little so you can actually see them, rather than a dark blur.
Leigh
My real interest is in working with the images. My problem is I'm not very computer literate-I'm an 'old fashion' painter-so I'm not sure how much I can do with the limited graphics programs I have. I'm pretty sure I can take care of the smudge, but it would require me using Paint to remove the smudge, then printing the image out and doing the retouch by hand-I used to work as a photo re-touch person-then scanning the re-touched image to send back to you. Which I would be glad to do. I've posted the image at an artist website I belong to, that has a VERY active computer graphics forum and asked their advice. I've also asked about a good graphics program. Though from what I've seen so far, most of the images you folks have, at the most just require a little brightening and maybe a tiny bite of color adjustment. That I CAN do with what I have. Anything I CAN'T do, I will say so. I'm sure that Adobe Photoshop would take care of anything at all I would need to do, but due to lack of cash, buying it is out of the question for now. Oh yes, I figured I would need to contact the person who originally did the book, and ask for a high res file of the images. I just wanted someone to see what a difference lightening them, makes. Leigh Andrew Sly <sly@victoria.tc.ca> wrote: Leigh: How accomplished are you as editing images? If you'd like to help with this particular item I have underway, one image could use a small clean-up where there seems to be a smudge of blue ink. Take a look at http://www.victoria.tc.ca/~sly/pb.htm (See the first "alphabet" image, on the baby's forehead.) This is beyond what I feel comfortable dealing with. If you are interested, I have a 1.4mb png file that I would request to have edited and returned in the same format. Or, were you asking in a more general point of view? By far the easiest way for a new volunteer to contribute to Project Gutenberg is to sign up at Distributed Proofreaders (pgdp.net) and help with one page at a time. And about your re-worked images, it would be best to ask one of the white-washers, (people who actually post files). Perhaps via errata [at] pglaf.org. In that case, please include more full details, such as PG number of the ebook. In this case, I can predict that a likely response would be that lightened images would be welcome if you can make them from an original source. In the case at hand the files included are jpgs. Jpgs use a lossy compression, which means that each time you save them, some information is lost. So if you take a jpg, edit it and save it again, you are probably going to have a file which is both larger in size and poorer in quality than what you started with. If you really want to perserver on this text, you could then try to contact whoever prepared this text and ask if high-resolution images are availible you could work from. (And all of this provides a good argument why I'd like to preserve hi-res images somewhere for the text I'm working on.) Andrew On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Jacqulyn Perry wrote:
Hi Andrew! That sounds like a great idea, and a sensible compromise! Is there a way I could help with this? I'm not sure HOW I could help, I don't have access to the books, as I seriously doubt I could get my hands on a copy of any of these books-most are collectors items and way outside my budget.
In the meantime, I still have the re-worked images I mentioned, which I would very much like to pass on to you or whomever. They are the same ones in the original file, just re-worked a little so you can actually see them, rather than a dark blur.
Leigh
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Hi Jacqulyn, You might have a look at The GIMP, which does almost everything photoshop does and is free. There is an Illustrators team at DP that always needs help. I hope that you, and perhaps some of the folks you are in contact with, will join and give us a hand with our illustrations. I hope that eventually DP will have a parallel process that will have experts preparing illustrations while the text is being proofed and formatted. Whether for DP or otherwise, there are several common steps in prepping illustrations for a PG book. First, the originals have to be scanned. Getting good scans of illustrations takes practice and not all of our volunteer content providers are good at it. But everyone does the best they can and we encourage them all to scan illustrations at a decent resolution and, in the case of DP, upload those scans to our server. Another stage of the process is taking the raw scans and making them as good as possible, while still leaving them large for archiving. I usually do this before I upload to the DP server (stuff like deskewing, making sure the colors match as best as possible, etc). But not all volunteers have learned enough about graphics programs to do that part. Then further, PG usually wants illustrations that will look good on a screen, and to keep the overall file sizes down, so there is another stage of processing that reduces the image as much as possible without unacceptable loss of detail. There are definitely tricks to doing that (which I don't know). Often folks will choose to make a smaller version for display within the ebook and a larger one that can be obtained by clicking on the picture. Also, what's considered "reasonable" for size and detail depends to some extent on the book. A children's picture book, or a book about art, can reasonably have larger illustrations than something that was starting with not-so-good B&W photographs poorly printed. We deal with everything from simple line art to steel-cut engravings (very fine detail) to printed color illustrations (needing descreening) to the xyz-gravure stuff that seems to scan beautifully (I don't know what the process is for the various -gravure stuff but it doesn't seem to result in the same kind of screen dots that one sees in most color or B&W photo stuff), to beat-up decorative book covers. There are also illustrations and maps that are too large to be scanned in one piece and need to be put back together. Lots of challenges for people who like to do restoration. JulietS DP Site Admin Jacqulyn Perry wrote:
My real interest is in working with the images. My problem is I'm not very computer literate-I'm an 'old fashion' painter-so I'm not sure how much I can do with the limited graphics programs I have.
I'm pretty sure I can take care of the smudge, but it would require me using Paint to remove the smudge, then printing the image out and doing the retouch by hand-I used to work as a photo re-touch person-then scanning the re-touched image to send back to you. Which I would be glad to do.
I've posted the image at an artist website I belong to, that has a VERY active computer graphics forum and asked their advice. I've also asked about a good graphics program. Though from what I've seen so far, most of the images you folks have, at the most just require a little brightening and maybe a tiny bite of color adjustment. That I CAN do with what I have. Anything I CAN'T do, I will say so.
I'm sure that Adobe Photoshop would take care of anything at all I would need to do, but due to lack of cash, buying it is out of the question for now.
Oh yes, I figured I would need to contact the person who originally did the book, and ask for a high res file of the images. I just wanted someone to see what a difference lightening them, makes.
Leigh
Oh good! Does the GIMP software have a Help file? I hope? Okay, what is DP? Is it part of PG? I'm really interested in working with childrens book illus, as that is what I have some background in as an artist. After I've learned more about working with computer graphics programs, I would probably be willing to help out with the other types of imaging work as well. Leigh Juliet Sutherland <vze3rknp@verizon.net> wrote: Hi Jacqulyn, You might have a look at The GIMP, which does almost everything photoshop does and is free. There is an Illustrators team at DP that always needs help. I hope that you, and perhaps some of the folks you are in contact with, will join and give us a hand with our illustrations. I hope that eventually DP will have a parallel process that will have experts preparing illustrations while the text is being proofed and formatted. Whether for DP or otherwise, there are several common steps in prepping illustrations for a PG book. First, the originals have to be scanned. Getting good scans of illustrations takes practice and not all of our volunteer content providers are good at it. But everyone does the best they can and we encourage them all to scan illustrations at a decent resolution and, in the case of DP, upload those scans to our server. Another stage of the process is taking the raw scans and making them as good as possible, while still leaving them large for archiving. I usually do this before I upload to the DP server (stuff like deskewing, making sure the colors match as best as possible, etc). But not all volunteers have learned enough about graphics programs to do that part. Then further, PG usually wants illustrations that will look good on a screen, and to keep the overall file sizes down, so there is another stage of processing that reduces the image as much as possible without unacceptable loss of detail. There are definitely tricks to doing that (which I don't know). Often folks will choose to make a smaller version for display within the ebook and a larger one that can be obtained by clicking on the picture. Also, what's considered "reasonable" for size and detail depends to some extent on the book. A children's picture book, or a book about art, can reasonably have larger illustrations than something that was starting with not-so-good B&W photographs poorly printed. We deal with everything from simple line art to steel-cut engravings (very fine detail) to printed color illustrations (needing descreening) to the xyz-gravure stuff that seems to scan beautifully (I don't know what the process is for the various -gravure stuff but it doesn't seem to result in the same kind of screen dots that one sees in most color or B&W photo stuff), to beat-up decorative book covers. There are also illustrations and maps that are too large to be scanned in one piece and need to be put back together. Lots of challenges for people who like to do restoration. JulietS DP Site Admin Jacqulyn Perry wrote:
My real interest is in working with the images. My problem is I'm not very computer literate-I'm an 'old fashion' painter-so I'm not sure how much I can do with the limited graphics programs I have.
I'm pretty sure I can take care of the smudge, but it would require me using Paint to remove the smudge, then printing the image out and doing the retouch by hand-I used to work as a photo re-touch person-then scanning the re-touched image to send back to you. Which I would be glad to do.
I've posted the image at an artist website I belong to, that has a VERY active computer graphics forum and asked their advice. I've also asked about a good graphics program. Though from what I've seen so far, most of the images you folks have, at the most just require a little brightening and maybe a tiny bite of color adjustment. That I CAN do with what I have. Anything I CAN'T do, I will say so.
I'm sure that Adobe Photoshop would take care of anything at all I would need to do, but due to lack of cash, buying it is out of the question for now.
Oh yes, I figured I would need to contact the person who originally did the book, and ask for a high res file of the images. I just wanted someone to see what a difference lightening them, makes.
Leigh
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There is some documentation at: http://www.gimp.org/docs/ And a list of books in print at: http://www.gimp.org/books/ I have done most of the image processing on the Beatrix Potter books (Not all, but most of them), and while I'm not 100% happy with them, they are fairly decent. For an example: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17089/17089-h/17089-h.htm My workflow for the potter books (color, screened images): (Note, this also assumes that you are working within the DP workflow; not everyone chooses to do so.) 1) Scan at 600 DPI 24-bit color, using a scanner profile, and not auto-exposure. (Auto-exposure was causing some hard-to-track-down color shifts.) I have calibrated my scanner with a standard target, but the bigger issue is to get the scans consistent across the whole scan. A rough calibration of your monitor settings is not a bad idea, either. There are a number of websites with color bars to assist this. 2) Load two or three images into Gimp/Photoshop, and play with the settings for that particular book.. radius for gaussian blur in the descreening process, levels, unsharp settings, etc. After determining the settings, I'll load them into an action and apply them to all images. a) Descreen. There are some alternative methods (the russian descreening plugin is pretty good at preserving detail), and some scanner drivers do better than others when descreening at stage 1. Typically, if descreening in software, I'll magnify to 200%, and adjust the gaussian blur radius to just show a slight visible hatching in darker areas. b) Downscale (bicubic) to 300 DPI. This reduces file size and makes image easier to work with, now that we have removed any possibility of moire patterns. (Staying at 600 DPI does not help as we threw away any extra information with the blur.) c) Adjust levels, hue, and saturation. It is best done with a light hand, as it is difficult to tell exactly how the colors looked before they faded. Typically I'll show a sample to a few people as a sanity check at this stage. d) If I don't think the post processor will do one after the final scaling, I will do a moderate sharpening (usually unsharp mask) at this stage to compensate for the blurring effect from steps b and a. (These steps can't be scripted and have to be done to each image by hand.) e) Clean up dust marks, printing artifacts, etc. I haven't found anything particularly effective at repairing misaligned screens (it is usually not visible at the final resolution in any case), but most other problems can be cleaned up. f) Crop, and force remaining background (if any) to white. Remember, your image will be rectangular and displayed against a white background. You can specify an alpha layer in your PNG, but this will not be preserved in the final JPG. g) Save as PNG. At this stage, images will be on the order of 1 MB apiece. I'd prefer to save the raw scans as well, but they are much bigger. The post processor downloads these images, scales them to fit current guidelines (usually 400-600 pixels across), compresses them to an appropriate format (usually JPG for these types of images), and inserts them into the HTML. Most images end up in the 50-100 kb range. R C On 7/9/06, Jacqulyn Perry <urbangleaner56@yahoo.com> wrote:
Oh good! Does the GIMP software have a Help file? I hope?
Okay, what is DP? Is it part of PG? I'm really interested in working with childrens book illus, as that is what I have some background in as an artist. After I've learned more about working with computer graphics programs, I would probably be willing to help out with the other types of imaging work as well. Leigh
*Juliet Sutherland <vze3rknp@verizon.net>* wrote:
Hi Jacqulyn,
You might have a look at The GIMP, which does almost everything photoshop does and is free.
There is an Illustrators team at DP that always needs help. I hope that you, and perhaps some of the folks you are in contact with, will join and give us a hand with our illustrations. I hope that eventually DP will have a parallel process that will have experts preparing illustrations while the text is being proofed and formatted.
Whether for DP or otherwise, there are several common steps in prepping illustrations for a PG book. First, the originals have to be scanned. Getting good scans of illustrations takes practice and not all of our volunteer content providers are good at it. But everyone does the best they can and we encourage them all to scan illustrations at a decent resolution and, in the case of DP, upload those scans to our server. Another stage of the process is taking the raw scans and making them as good as possible, while still leaving them large for archiving. I usually do this before I upload to the DP server (stuff like deskewing, making sure the colors match as best as possible, etc). But not all volunteers have learned enough about graphics programs to do that part. Then further, PG usually wants illustrations that will look good on a screen, and to keep the overall file sizes down, so there is another stage of processing that reduces the image as much as possible without unacceptable loss of detail. There are definitely tricks to doing that (which I don't know). Often folks will choose to make a smaller version for display within the ebook and a larger one that can be obtained by clicking on the picture. Also, what's considered "reasonable" for size and detail depends to some extent on the book. A children's picture book, or a book about art, can reasonably have larger illustrations than something that was starting with not-so-good B&W photographs poorly printed.
We deal with everything from simple line art to steel-cut engravings (very fine detail) to printed color illustrations (needing descreening) to the xyz-gravure stuff that seems to scan beautifully (I don't know what the process is for the various -gravure stuff but it doesn't seem to result in the same kind of screen dots that one sees in most color or B&W photo stuff), to beat-up decorative book covers. There are also illustrations and maps that are too large to be scanned in one piece and need to be put back together. Lots of challenges for people who like to do restoration.
JulietS DP Site Admin
Jacqulyn Perry wrote:
My real interest is in working with the images. My problem is I'm not very computer literate-I'm an 'old fashion' painter-so I'm not sure how much I can do with the limited graphics programs I have.
I'm pretty sure I can take care of the smudge, but it would require me using Paint to remove the smudge, then printing the image out and doing the retouch by hand-I used to work as a photo re-touch person-then scanning the re-touched image to send back to you. Which I would be glad to do.
I've posted the image at an artist website I belong to, that has a VERY active computer graphics forum and asked their advice. I've also asked about a good graphics program. Though from what I've seen so far, most of the images you folks have, at the most just require a little brightening and maybe a tiny bite of color adjustment. That I CAN do with what I have. Anything I CAN'T do, I will say so.
I'm sure that Adobe Photoshop would take care of anything at all I would need to do, but due to lack of cash, buying it is out of the question for now.
Oh yes, I figured I would need to contact the person who originally did the book, and ask for a high res file of the images. I just wanted someone to see what a difference lightening them, makes.
Leigh
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Hi Andrew, Andrew Sly wrote:
How accomplished are you as editing images? If you'd like to help with this particular item I have underway, one image could use a small clean-up where there seems to be a smudge of blue ink. Take a look at http://www.victoria.tc.ca/~sly/pb.htm (See the first "alphabet" image, on the baby's forehead.) This is beyond what I feel comfortable dealing with. If you are interested, I have a 1.4mb png file that I would request to have edited and returned in the same format.
If you have not already found someone with the necessary software, I can take care of that in a couple of secs. It would be best to work from a larger sized image -- I assume the large PNG is basically at the original scanned resolution. Also, if it seems desirable, I can set you up with Photoshop and/or any other Adobe software you might need or want. I work for Adobe and can get anything PG might need. ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com> Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.
participants (5)
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Andrew Sly -
Gardner Buchanan -
Jacqulyn Perry -
Juliet Sutherland -
Robert Cicconetti