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[Brana G]

 I am currently ripping my whole CD collection (3000+ CDs) and while I wait for rips I've decided to scan front cover artwork, just to do it right.

I am scanning at 600 dpi, saving as tiff files. I use a Canon CanoScan 9000F and use the Color Magazine setting. Then I go into Photoshop, hit Filter>Noise>Despeckle a few times to try and minimize those little dots from the artwork printing process. Hit save.

Then I go into Lightroom, import graphic and do the following:

1) Crop the image 
2) Use spot removal to meticulously remove spots and artifacts
3) Add noise reduction and take down detail. I find these eliminate the tiny dots as well and give it a more polished look.

Then export as full sized jpeg to embed in the DSD and mp3 files.


The biggest culprits are the tiny dots you see as you zoom in that show you the CD artwork printing process for the most part is low DPI and not that great.

Any other tips? Any else doing hi-rez scans and editing? 2900x3000 ish?

Googled for definitive ways to do this but didn't come up with much. Thanks guys

Brana

[mark_h]

I use an Action set in Photoshop that does colour correction, some cleaning, some sharpening and resizing (and then I do manual work if necessary).

You can grab my actions here (you will want to remove/replace the colour correction profile stuff as that's only relevant to my scanner).

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7082504/CD%20Processing.atn

[6233638]

I use an FFT plugin to remove pattern noise as it generally does a much better job of pattern removal than the despeckle option of other blur filters. (not sure which it was now though - I haven't done any scanning since I reinstalled Windows a while back)

Because I only have a document scanner, I actually find that I often get better results from downloading a high quality scan online and fixing it up.
For some covers I do still have to use a blur filter, and after making edits I actually find that it can be useful to add a small amount of noise. (helps mask some of the blur)
I was going to post some examples, but I think I've either lost most/all of the covers I scanned in myself (there was an incident not that long after trying MC for the first time...) or simply replaced them with higher quality copies that I've found online now.

[JimH]

There should be a setting to remove the moiré pattern that scanning a printed image causes.

[MrC]

My process.

1. Scan at high resolution w/De-screening enabled.  1200 is sufficient.
2. Align and crop to desired aspect ratio
3. Adjust Levels
4. Spot touch-ups as necessary
5. Additional color correction as necessary
6. Resize to target dimensions
7. Unsharp mask

Descreening is critical for scanned print work.  Don't use blur.  I don't know about the newer Photoshops beyond CS2, but Photoshop did not come with a descreening tool (there are add-ons filters available, but many are very expensive, and they vary in quality considerably).

[kstuart]

The absolute best way to get an image of your CD's cover is to type into a browser:

images.google.com

and then type in the name of the album.

Even the most obscure CD has already been scanned, because the obscure and rare ones get big bucks, and so auctions have the cover images on the web.

Even at McDonalds wages, the time saved should be equivalent to the original cost of the CD.

[MrC]

I've found it 50-50 at best.  Many older CDs simply do not have good cover art available via google images.  I always search, but find I end up suppling the Internet with better artwork.  Unfortunately, Amazon shutdown its Customer Images submission and retrieval, so there goes years worth of submissions down the drain (I think I was near 300 submissions).

[6233638]

The absolute best way to get an image of your CD's cover is to type into a browser:
images.google.com
and then type in the name of the album.

I've mentioned it before, but I use this to grab cover art via Media Center's Links Bar:

Code: [Select]

https:////www.google.com//search?as_st=y&tbm=isch&as_q=Hexify([Album Artist (auto)] [Album])&safe=images&tbs=isz:lt,islt:2mp,iar:s,imgo:1&biw=1920&bih=984

Even the most obscure CD has already been scanned, because the obscure and rare ones get big bucks, and so auctions have the cover images on the web.

Even at McDonalds wages, the time saved should be equivalent to the original cost of the CD.

If everything is a cost/time equation to you, why spend the time ripping and organizing a library at all?
Just buy a CD player and put the disc in. Or pay someone else to do it for you.
 
For me, I like to spend some time just relaxing and listening to music.
Doing this sort of editing is brushing up on my image editing skills, and does not really involve so much concentration that it distracts from the music.

I've found it 50-50 at best.  Many older CDs simply do not have good cover art available via google images.  I always search, but find I end up suppling the Internet with better artwork.  Unfortunately, Amazon shutdown its Customer Images submission and retrieval, so there goes years worth of submissions down the drain (I think I was near 300 submissions).

It's a shame that Media Center's built in cover art downloading/submission feature is not any better.
It only seems to work up to 1000px in size, and I've submitted a number of high quality covers which have never shown up in the results.

Even if the best version of a cover is only a low resolution one and does show up there, you're still better off grabbing it via Google Images than Media Center, as they seem to be re-compressed at a lower quality.
 
If I had the knowledge and time, I'd actually be interested in setting up a site that accepted user requests which were manually screened, and would only offer the highest quality artwork available. I'd actually love it if something like that could be integrated into a player so that updates could be pushed to users when a better source is found.

Failing that, maybe we could have a dedicated cover art topic (or forum?) so that people could put in requests when they can't find a good version of a specific album?

But the JRiver team don't really seem that interested in high quality artwork - PNGs are not supported, high quality downsampling is not used, and they are displayed with a ton of JPG compression. The issue is magnified on OS X if you're using a Retina Mac.
 
Something else you have to worry about is that Media Center is not a color managed application, so you need to make sure your cover art is in sRGB or it will not display correctly. Guess which one of these is Media Center. (displayed at 2x)

source art

It's disappointing that so much attention is paid to some aspects of the program, but in other areas, "good enough" will do.
It seems short-sighted not to support these things, when display resolutions keep going up.

[MrC]

Since many folks are pretty happy with what they find, maybe another way to help is to have an Artwork Wanted thread, where users supply artwork when other users request it.  Maybe that would go nuts though.

[glynor]

This doesn't address methodology at all, but I can strongly recommend some scanning software that will make your life much easier if you do a lot of scanning:

VueScan

Amazing stuff.  One unbelievable thing about VueScan is that it does NOT use the TWAIN drivers provided by the manufacturers.  It is all integrated into the software itself, and it supports an massive array of scanners.  That means that if you have an older scanner that is suddenly no longer supported on modern versions of Windows (or OSX).  No problem.  It'll keep working.  You don't even need to have the drivers installed at all and it'll work (at least in most, if not all cases).  I've used it to support perfectly good scanners that were abandoned by manufacturers through multiple OS transitions before.

And, it is highly automate-able, and rock-solid stable.  The developer releases builds like JRiver too, so there's always something new.

Back when I did a lot of graphics work at the office, VueScan was an essential component of any print-to-digital workflow (or film-to-digital, whatever).  Love it.  There is a fully-functional free trial available.  If you're doing a lot of scanning, I highly recommend checking it out.

[glynor]

It's disappointing that so much attention is paid to some aspects of the program, but in other areas, "good enough" will do.
It seems short-sighted not to support these things, when display resolutions keep going up.

Just because they aren't taking immediate action on something, doesn't mean they don't care.  This is a very small software shop (though it got a little bigger recently, and I think we'll all see some big benefits from that).  Prioritization is essential.  You might not always agree with their prioritization decisions, but there are always factors "under the covers" that we can't see.

For example, in this case...

I don't know.  I'm making this up, but it is certainly plausible that they completely agree with your entire point regarding image rendering capabilities.  But, the image rendering engine they have behind MC needs to be incredibly high performance to support the smooth scrolling and scaling of TONS of images on the screen at one time in some cases.  Go to some view that shows a TON of artwork (some kind of all-albums view), crank the thumbnail size all the way small, and scroll up and down.  Watch how fast the views open and render the art on the screen.

So, that's all custom, and probably pretty low-level.  Re-writing it all might take a huge development effort (sucking down months of Matt's time almost exclusively).  Is it that important?  Are there other things more important first?  Is it more important than supporting Theater View or Video on OSX?  Is it more important than a high-end audio feature (that I don't care about) but which brings in a bunch of sales?  I don't know what the back-end code looks like, and I also don't know what their corporate clients are asking for...

I do agree that, generally, it would be better to see some better cover art support (and, generally, retina support).  But those high-resolution screens are all still pretty new, and what is their overall market share, and what kind of cost-vs-reward does it have for JRiver?

I don't know.  I get that you're interested in seeing some UI improvements.  I agree.  I don't know if Matt does, but I bet he'd say "yes, those things are all important, but there's X factor in the way, and I got this stuff over here too".  I been hanging out here for a long while.  Give it time.  Just when you think they've forgotten about something for a long while, they'll suddenly ship a build with a huge change underneath (that has obviously taken a lot of work over months or years and which has all been hidden)...

I'll tell you this much.  I've never, ever seen or dealt with a developer that is this open to the suggestions of and needs of their customers.  They're listening.  There's just only a few of them, and they don't (they can't) always explain everything behind the scenes.  No comment isn't always no.

[rjm]

+1 on the VueScan recommendation, it is the best.

Everything I have read plus lots of experience says anything greater than 300 dpi is a waste of bits for printed material and photographs. There is no more information on a piece of paper than 300 dpi.

On the other hand, if you are scanning a transparency (negative or slide) there is more information available to scan and you should use 1200 dpi at a minimum but no more than 4800 dpi (if you have an excellent scanner).

[Brana G]

Thanks for all the ideals guys. I will probably opt for a Photoshop Plugin for descreening if the expense is under $200 due to the amount of scanning I plan on doing, plus I only want to do this once. With the size of hard drives increasing and costs decreasing, I'm not concerned about file sizes so I am doing scans as large as I can right now for any bits of information that might get picked up. I've had great results so far but want to eliminate those pesky dots you get from printed material.

Brana

[Frobozz]

Using a descreening algorithm that uses the Fourier transform method of descreening is the secret for getting good cover art scans.  The Fourier method doesn't blur the image like the other descreening methods.  If you blur the image right from the start you spend all the rest of your editing time trying to recover from the blurring, and it's impossible to fully recover.  With the Fourier descreen the image doesn't get blurred so your editing time is spent just cleaning up the image rather than trying to do the impossible job of unburring.

With the Fourier descreening it is possible to get nice sharp CD covers at 1000x1000 or 800x800.  With the blurry descreening it is a struggle to get just a reasonably sharp 600x600 final image.

I use GIMP.  There's a free Fourier descreening plugin for GIMP.  The G'MIC utility can also be used to descreen.
There's also some commercial Fourier descreening plugins for Photoshop that are reasonably priced.  This one is popular among people doing cover art scanning.