Heartland

How do you do it?

My scanner (all scanners as far as I'm aware) aren't big enough to fit a 12" record cover on, so how do you scan them?

Bend them in two and make a recto-verso copy. Don't bother taking the record out of the sleeve.

For others than your Mish collection tho, you can just take a pic with a digicam or scan two halves and 'glue' them together with Photoshop or similar.

IZ.

i had to do this for loads of sleeves for the ghost dance & march violets websites…

best way i found was to remove the record from the sleeve and then scan each “corner� of the sleeve separately & re-assemble them in photoshop.

takes a bit of faffing

if you put a large black (or dark) cloth over the record sleeve, underneath the scanner lid you can prevent a lot of the light from getting under the scanner lid.

also, on my scanner software it gives you the option to force certain rgb, brightness and contrast settings – i found it was better to do this than let it auto choose… otherwise it can give you different looking scans for each corner of the sleeve!! find a good combination of values for these settings and then use them for all the scans.

luckily, with the ghost dance artwork, a lot of the sleeves had solid blocks of colour, which you could just do a flood-fill on to make a much nicer and smoother looking scan. eg: http://www.ghostdance.co.uk/discography ... 12back.jpg

a couple of times i also found that i needed to slightly rotate a corner scan by 2 or 3 degrees to compensate for scanning innacuracies and subtle movements of the sleeve while on the scanner glass.

Quiff Boy wrote:a couple of times i also found that i needed to slightly rotate a corner scan by 2 or 3 degrees to compensate for scanning innacuracies and subtle movements of the sleeve while on the scanner glass.

Nightmare!

One I did once didn't look right until I'd rotated it 0.3 of a degree!

markfiend wrote:

Quiff Boy wrote:a couple of times i also found that i needed to slightly rotate a corner scan by 2 or 3 degrees to compensate for scanning innacuracies and subtle movements of the sleeve while on the scanner glass.

Nightmare!

One I did once didn't look right until I'd rotated it 0.3 of a degree!

yep! i think its whats they call a "labour of love"

Many thanks for the above, it clearly is as difficult as I expected.

I usually scan 2 halves + bottom or top depending on how you lay the sleeve onto the flatbed, then create a new image in a photo editor paste the halves etc.. together. Needless to say this is an annoying way to go about things as sometimes the scanned bits don't 'fit' onto each other as you expected (start over ...)

I'd say buy a digital camera

markfiend wrote:One I did once didn't look right until I'd rotated it 0.3 of a degree!

The Devil is in the detail, luckily Photoshop will accommodate even a 0.1 degree rotation.

Red Sunsets wrote:

markfiend wrote:One I did once didn't look right until I'd rotated it 0.3 of a degree!

The Devil is in the detail, luckily Photoshop will accommodate even a 0.1 degree rotation.

Indeedy. But it's the trial and error that's the nightmare. Every time it's wrong you have to undo and try a different figure; too many rotations degrades the image from excessive resampling.

It's not so bad with images for the web, but even Photoshop on a super-duper G5 takes time to rotate a 2548*3505 pixel image (the full bed of my scanner at 300 dpi)