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I'm wondering if anyone here has bothered to archive other Magic product images, such as booster packs. I'm trying to put together a full set of booster pictures, but decent quality pictures are hard to come by, especially pre-10th edition.

If only I knew a big LGS with lots of old packs, I might just be able to show up with a camera, but sadly I don't.

I was wishing we had these too. Maybe going forward we could scan new set packs with the cards, tokens, inserts. What do our scanners think? Each set tends to have four artwork features.

we don't have anything like that so far.

I do have quite allot of them, but I can't scan all I have at the moment, it will have to wait a bit.

Here's a sample. Tell me what you think. I will scan them one at a time instead of a group as I did here, which I then cut them separately. The focus of these are ok, but it will be better when their done one at a time.

Not sure what size or resolution you want/need so I scanned at 300dpi.
Let me know what size quality you need.

Also, many of the sets have multiple designs for packs, usually 4 per set. I have a ton of this stuff so I will scan one of everything I've got.

I also have a ton of Starter decks, Pre-constructed decks & World Championship decks that I can scan too if you want them.

Click on the images to see the full scan.

Are these unopened? I'm thinking an opened and flattend out package (Completely, with the top, bottom, and back seal components cut off) might scan wonderfully without any wrinkles? I'm not saying you should open them, I'm just wondering if the result would be different. Maybe with a book to hold them flat.

These 3 are unopened, but as I said, I did a quick setup of 3 packs that I scanned together so they're not placed as I would if doing a single pack at a time.

Most of what I'll use is unopened, as far as booster packs are concerned. The other decks that I mentioned are all opened but still in their original deck boxes.

At least for unopened packs, I don't think that scanning will work very well. The area not directly on the plate will be severely out of focus, and the light reflections from the metallic parts are severe.

I think that in the long run, what we'd need to have is a regular picture from a good camera in good light.

As to my current little project, I'm collecting card pack pictures for Forge. I've found very little available online, in decent quality, and I'm looking for all the variants of each of them.

Thanks for being willing to help out. I think that a community HQ set of pictures for packaging would be nice to have, and I think it's worth working on.

Yes, but where do you draw the line ? The fat packs are also beautiful, the card index-book inside as well, the big displays, the instruction sheets inside the intro packs etc etc etc.

Personally I think we should cut things off at packaging with barcodes on it. Anything that is mass-distributed is relevant to the general public. Booklets would be way too much work and I doubt people care enough about them to produce the scans. I feel the same about the inserts to be honest, but we've already got almost every one, so why stop now.

And Extreme, I am writing that thing up, I've just been so busy...

Well I have a DSLR camera & other equipment to do it but I don't have nearly the time nor the desire to do all that work. As you can see from this iPhone picture, I have allot of Magic product, and this is just a small portion of all that I have. Scanning is easy & frankly the preferred way & the only way I could even attempt to do anything like this.

You'll have issues with reflection due to the different materials used in the wrappers no matter how the images are acquired. For instance, the Fallen Empires booster is not the usual silver based colour, but a white plastic package. I think that the 3 images I scanned rather quickly, are not all that bad for glare apart from the foil ends.
The glare could be cropped & or worked out of the scans with an image editor, but again, that brings in much more work that has to be done.

As for Forge, I play it often & many of the images of the packs are not even close to being as good in quality as the ones I have above, so it will be a long search to find better ones, especially for those from many of the older sets.

Keep at it though, it would be cool to see it!

I agree that the current Forge pics are bad. Also, I know it would take some dedicated effort to take pictures and process them. As far as how long it would take, I suppose there's really no rush at all. Anyone is welcome to contribute what they want when they like.

But as far as scanning goes, you can't process out the problems. Glare is an issue, but that can mostly be solved with proper lighting (natural diffused is best).

I took this picture with a DSLR camera and then processed it in Photoshop. You can see the difference.



Also, yesterday I uploaded a new set of booster pics that hopefully will be in the next Forge beta.

There's still some glare on the top & more on the bottom left foil ends of your shot and also, some of the image, especially near the middle left where the Advanced Level icon is, is bit out of focus. I agree that photography would be a better way but as I said in my earlier post, I don't have nearly enough time to do it that way.

Frankly, apart from the glare on a small strip on the top right of the Ice Age pack end foil, I think it's quality is better than the picture you took, IMO.
As far as scanners go, I disagree with you as I certainly could correct those problems using tools like Clone, Smudge, Burn & others in Photoshop. For instance, I could clone the bottom foil end of the Ice Age booster over the top one and goodbye glare!
Believe me, I've worked on scans of old photographs & other things for clients that were far worse than any of the results you see from the quick scan I did above. It's just too time consuming for all of the work that would have to be done to get it the way you guys want it.

These aren't the card images where the pristine quality of those pics are desirable & worth doing that way. For me, the image of the Ice Age booster is good enough to serve the purpose, especially in a manner that you see it in Forge, but again, it's just my opinion.

Well any help you're willing to give would be appreciated, no matter what. We don't have anything at all right now, so even an imperfect process is preferable.

For starter decks and other things like that, I'd like to have a scan but also a picture taken at about this angle. Would that work for you?

That is really nice!

Yes, that would indeed work for me.

Love the angled shot, gives it a nice 3D effect. This is a prime example of how a photograph is better than a scan, again depending on what the image is going to be used for and in this case, your shot is just about perfect. I also like the way the top of deck box is open just a crack to again give it a nice sense of reality, almost like you can see yourself opening the deck.

I'll do what I can over the coming months and get it here so you can choose what you want to use for Forge.

Well done Xitax!