Photoshoppers Needed

[woogerboy21]

For now send a sample to extreme.

We're always interested in new and improved documentation. We'd love to have instructions for using GIMP, unless for some reason it can't do the job Photoshop.

I've done the steps in both Photoshop and GIMP. I personally find GIMP to be easier to use but that just may be because I started off using it and then jumping into Photoshop. I would be glad to write up documentation for one or the other (or both). I would want someone like Extreme to either shoot me a small line by line message that notes the important steps so I don't miss something OR take a look at the documentation when I am done to make sure I didn't miss anything.

I can basically see most of everything that is done using the automation scripts included in .zip posted above but looking over some of the tasks it looks like some are either older and may not be used any longer or redundant.

[woogerboy21]

Just curious, are the guys that created the action files able to edit them and change the save file paths? I for one don't have the paths specified in them and haven't found an easy way to change the paths. I've been having to edit them in a raw format.

Edit:
I see that in skibulk's tasks he does a level adjustment of 15,240 and a hue adjustment of -10. But in extreme's its a level adjustment of 13,245 and a saturation adjustment of -10 and hue isn't touched. What is the goal? Is the color level adjustments designed to drop off the lower range on the outer edge? And how about the hue/sat adjustment goal?

[woogerboy21]

These are the results differences I end up with when using the different action files (for just the slice that does the hue/sat adjustments. Just looking for clarity on if I did something wrong, or what the expected results should be.

Edit:
I would assume follow Extreme's since he is the one that has been doing the processing....?

[skibulk]

I explained the adjustments in step 1 of my tutorial. They are to be customized to the scans, because every scanner gives different results. So if one person scans the whole set, you've got it easier. You just figure out the adjustments that best approximate the official cards. And as I explain in step 1, it is wise to match them to the Wizard's card image gallery, since those colors are 100% accurate and the cards themselves could even be off slightly from one print run to another, not to mention that matching physical cards to your monitor is complicated.

[woogerboy21]

Yeah I understood the point of the first step and the goal being to match color adjustments across images. But what threw me was the fact you both had actions involving actually performing the steps yet making generic adjustments that would seem to cause differences than what appeared to be the intended goal.

Must just be a misunderstanding on my part and functionality unfamiliarity with Photoshop.

[skibulk]

Oh sorry if that was confusing. The idea is that most of the time you'll have say, 10 or more 9-card scans to correct. So if you hard-code the adjustment into the action before you process the scans, you save yourself the labor of applying the adjustments to each scan individually.

[extreme]

well, that -10 saturation only applies to certain scanners, it's not usually active. In fact, many of the level/color corrections are inactive in the action, and I only use if I think they are needed. I know, not very helpful
I never used any desaturation or level adj. on ark's scans, for ex.
I think that the state of action steps is not exported when saving the action set, which causes the confusion. But we'll work on thsi together.

[woogerboy21]

I would hope that the raw scan/slices (and maybe even the perspective crop) images would have no adjustments done to them so if errors occurred in producing the final product those steps wouldn't need to be redone. But there also is the fact that if those adjustments are needed doing them on individual images rather than an entire sheet could produce extended amounts of processing time...

I just know the times I've done image processing for personal collections I don't tinker with color adjustments till the last few processing steps since there is a group of steps that are the same regardless of scanner/input and others that differ based on it.

[tanthorjen]

Hi guys,

Do you need any help processing the scans? I would be more than happy to extend the resources of Decked Studios to assist. We have a professional photoshop guy on call that we use for some of our other work.

[woogerboy21]

Also one other question, are you guys considering the possibility of splitting the tasks out amongst multiple users or are you wanting one user to do all steps? For example if someone is willing to slice, and one perspective crop and another clone out things, would you be up for allowing multiple people work on things and keep some centralized repository of work?

One thing I've noticed when trying to help out is that when it comes to the color adjustments, one person may like / dislike what change are made compared to others and if that step can be controlled by a core group member the other steps can be more community supported.

[Huggybaby]

Hi guys,

Do you need any help processing the scans? I would be more than happy to extend the resources of Decked Studios to assist. We have a professional photoshop guy on call that we use for some of our other work.

We need all the help we can get, but right now we're still organizing, please stand by.

[Huggybaby]

Also one other question, are you guys considering the possibility of splitting the tasks out amongst multiple users or are you wanting one user to do all steps? For example if someone is willing to slice, and one perspective crop and another clone out things, would you be up for allowing multiple people work on things and keep some centralized repository of work?

One thing I've noticed when trying to help out is that when it comes to the color adjustments, one person may like / dislike what change are made compared to others and if that step can be controlled by a core group member the other steps can be more community supported.

This is a team effort, so work can be organized any which way, and as many people can help as is necessary.

We can arrange a repository.

For consistency, I expect one person only should do certain things, like color correction, and extreme must be consulted for this determination. There are histograms and all kinds of things to be considered. But I think the tasks of cropping and dust removal could be shared.

So it sounds like extreme needs to lay some ground rules.

[skibulk]

tanthorjen, we absolutely welcome the assistance of your company! As discussed earlier, quite a lot of labor hours are required to sustain this project. Please see my previous post and let us know how many hours/month you think your photoshopper can assist.

woogerboy21 and huggybaby, I agree with you both. Division of labor seems wise for both efficiency sake and consistency sake. I'll go through the French Homelands set that I recently scanned and see how long it takes to do everything except the dust and scratch removal (the longest step). If I can do this efficiently I'd be willing to process everything to that point, and divvy up the scans to the rest of our processing team. I'll report back soon.

This might actually enable more people to participate. All that would be required of contributors in this scenario is using the clone stamp tool. Even the free GIMP photo editing application should be sufficient for this.

[extreme]

we definitely need the help.
Now, about sharing the tasks, it might be possible, but I see a potential problem: it will introduce an extra jpeg compression step/image degradation in the process (working with tiffs is impractical for large sets, they're horribly big).
I have been working for the past 3 days putting everything in order and bordering everything to release pretty much everything in UHQ. I want to leave this as neat and as simple to use as possible. Please bear with me.

[skibulk]

@extreme

Looking at your action set, there are two saves to JPG. Once from scan to slices. And again after touch-up and framing. Seeing that you've been doing it with two steps for years now, I'll assume two save to JPG steps are acceptable for our purposes.

So if I do become the pre-processor/distributor as I just previously proposed, another lossy save to JPG would be introduced after the perspective crop step. To make up for this, I think we could take out a lossy save. Specifically, when saving slices I could instead save to TIFF. Then the save after crop wouldn't introduce additional image degredation. Correct me if this is illogical.

Edit: I guess the touch-up crew in this scinario would also add a lossy save on their end. So I guess they'd have to border the images on their end.

The lossless JPG2000 image format yields only 3 times increase in file size over the final 600 DPI JPG files.