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| Registered: March 14, 2007 |  Posts: 55 |
| | Posted: | | | | For several years now but more and more increasingly are covers "edited" to "improve its quality".
Please add to the rules that cosmetic changes (color and sharpness) only are not allowed !
A huge amount of good scans are destroyed by persons who think they find they have improved the pictures.
Maybe they look better on their own monitor or laptop... but to them i say... look on another scrreen for a change first and see its not improved at all !!!
I understand their good intention but don't do it anymore unless your 100% certain it looks more like the original cover !
I dont want to show examples as i don't want to fix it on individual persons, as again i understand the good intention, but want to mention it in general.
I am certainly interested what others think about it, or am i the only one who is annoyed by this ? | | | | Last edited: by ArnoBD |
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| Registered: March 13, 2007 |  Posts: 350 |
| | Posted: | | | | I am almost always pleased by new cover scans. When I think that a newly contributed scan is not an improvement over the existing scans, I vote NO, giving my detailed reasons. If a scan that I feel is inferior is accepted into the online database, I do not accept it into my local database. I don't actually find anything to get annoyed about in this (and trust me, I tend to get annoyed at the drop of a hat).
And while I expect that the English word you were looking for was "cosmetic", I quite like your existing choice, which gives the topic more gravitas, in my opinion. | | | | -fred |
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| Registered: May 29, 2007 | Reputation:  |  Posts: 3,475 |
| | Posted: | | | | I pull out my DVD and compare them to see which more accurately matches the actual cover. I compare the color, sharpness, cropping etc.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of covers currently in the database that do not look like the actual covers. I've seen ones that are so blurry they are illegible. Or some whose colors look nothing like the actual DVD.
If the rules were changed as you request then these inaccurate scans would not be allowed to be updated. So, I absolutely disagree with your statement about those changes not being allowed.
If you don't like the contribution and feel they don't match the actual covers, vote "no", give your rationale and lock your own scans so they aren't overwritten if the contribution gets accepted.
Cover scans are subjective for a lot of reasons so this is one of the very few areas I lock my local database. | | | | Last edited: by Kathy |
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| Registered: October 30, 2011 | Reputation:  | | Posts: 1,870 |
| | Posted: | | | | I agree with Kathy. That is what the voting process is for and if you don't like them lock yours when you see the vote come up.
Also I assume you meant "cosmetic" and not "cosmic"
I cannot personally think of an instance (at this time) where a worse scan was accepted.
They are very subjective. |
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| Registered: May 8, 2007 | | Posts: 824 |
| | Posted: | | | | I totally agree with the OP. Taking the existing scan and just playing with color and sharpness or other settings should NOT be allowed.
Unless it is a NEW scan with the aim to improve the old one, and it IS an improvement (which is left up to voting to decide), then it shouldn't be allowed. Resaving JPG's ends up degrading the image anyway. Who wants to have scans for titles that have been resaved countless times? | | | | 99.9% of all cat plans consist only of "Step 1." |
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| Registered: March 18, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 2,550 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Kathy: Quote:
I pull out my DVD and compare them to see which more accurately matches the actual cover. I compare the color, sharpness, cropping etc.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of covers currently in the database that do not look like the actual covers. I've seen ones that are so blurry they are illegible. Or some whose colors look nothing like the actual DVD.
If the rules were changed as you request then these inaccurate scans would not be allowed to be updated. So, I absolutely disagree with your statement about those changes not being allowed.
If you don't like the contribution and feel they don't match the actual covers, vote "no", give your rationale and lock your own scans so they aren't overwritten if the contribution gets accepted.
Cover scans are subjective for a lot of reasons so this is one of the very few areas I lock my local database. Agree 110%  |
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| Registered: May 29, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 3,475 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Grendell: Quote:
I totally agree with the OP. Taking the existing scan and just playing with color and sharpness or other settings should NOT be allowed.
I wonder how often that happens. Why would someone waste time trying to manipulate a scan that doesn't look like the actual cover? It seems to me it is easier and take less time to just submit a new scan. Quoting Grendell: Quote:
...Resaving JPG's ends up degrading the image anyway. I don't know what this means.  |
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| Registered: November 24, 2008 | | Reputation: |  Posts: 1,289 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Kathy: Quote:
Quoting Grendell:
Quote:
...Resaving JPG's ends up degrading the image anyway.
I don't know what this means. I think he means that compression upon compression upon compression isn't a good thing. | | | | Last edited: by GreyHulk |
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| Registered: June 21, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 2,621 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting GreyHulk: Quote:
Quoting Kathy:
Quote:
Quoting Grendell:
Quote:
...Resaving JPG's ends up degrading the image anyway.
I don't know what this means.
I think he means that compression upon compression upon compression isn't a good thing. It's just like VHS getting a bit blurrier each viewing. Seems like that shouldn't happen with a digital format though.  Hadn't heard this about jpg's though, what if you save at full size, do you still lose quality? |
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| Registered: March 20, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 2,852 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting bigdaddyhorse: Quote:
Hadn't heard this about jpg's though, what if you save at full size, do you still lose quality? Possibly. JPEG uses "lossy compression". You may have very little degradation or very much, depending on how much you need to reduce the file size. --------------- | | | | Last edited: by scotthm |
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| Registered: December 10, 2007 | Reputation:  | | Posts: 3,004 |
| | Posted: | | | | So are you saying we submit cover scans unless the existing scans are wrong? The OP says nothing about photoshopping the existing scan, just any images with cosmetic improvements. I like it when the cover looks as good as possible and can't imagine why anyone would want to keep bad scans when they could have improvements.
If your concern is that people are submitting things that aren't really improvements, vote against that. |
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| Registered: March 20, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 2,852 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Ace_of_Sevens: Quote:
If your concern is that people are submitting things that aren't really improvements, vote against that. Improvements are in the eye of the beholder. There are many scans with ridiculous amounts of contrast and sharpness boosting that many voters appear to like, but which look very unlike the actual cover. I think this may be what the OP is talking about. --------------- | | | | Last edited: by scotthm |
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| Registered: June 21, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 2,621 |
| | Posted: | | | | I read the OP as "if you aren't scanning the image yourself, don't try to tweak the existing" and call them improvements. To be fair, some are, some aren't, but it feels like cheating to take someone elses scan, play with the levels, and pass them off as new scans.
I am all for it in the cases where it does offer an improvement though. I almost always hate my reds and blacks when I scan, so if someone can get them looking right after I get em into the database, I'm down with that. If you can fix my scans, please do, but I can see others being annoyed by it and have seen a few of these submissions that don't look much different to me. |
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| Registered: March 13, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 20,111 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting bigdaddyhorse: Quote:
I read the OP as "if you aren't scanning the image yourself, don't try to tweak the existing" and call them improvements. To be fair, some are, some aren't, but it feels like cheating to take someone elses scan, play with the levels, and pass them off as new scans. That's how I understood the OP as well, and I agree with the first part. I usually only vote Yes if someone's tweaked the exisiting scans because they were very poorly cropped. Otherwise, why introduce even more .jpg compression? Just do new scans. The rules do say this (bold/underlined by me): Quote:
Before submitting new scans of cover art, make sure your new covers are of significantly higher quality than the existing online images. I take the definition of new scans to be just that...new scans. Not "tweaking" the existing .jpg scans in the database. Also, significantly higher quality than the existing says much too. | | | | Corey | | | | Last edited: by Katatonia |
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| Registered: March 20, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 2,852 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting bigdaddyhorse: Quote:
I read the OP as "if you aren't scanning the image yourself, don't try to tweak the existing" and call them improvements. My philosophy is if you're unable/unwilling to scan the covers yourself then don't contribute them (unless it's for a pre-release profile), but don't mess with other people's scans. --------------- |
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| Registered: March 14, 2007 | | Posts: 55 |
| | Posted: | | | | Thanks to all for giving a side on this issue. Indeed i was very good understood by reply's as: Quote:
bigdaddyhorse: "if you aren't scanning the image yourself, don't try to tweak the existing" and call them improvements Quote:
Katatonoa: I take the definition of new scans to be just that...new scans. Not "tweaking" the existing .jpg scans in the database. Quote:
Grendel: Taking the existing scan and just playing with color and sharpness or other settings should NOT be allowed. and i couldn't have said it myself better then Scotthm: Quote:
scotthm: Improvements are in the eye of the beholder. There are many scans with ridiculous amounts of contrast and sharpness boosting that many voters appear to like, but which look very unlike the actual cover. And yes you can reject the cover scan - that's what i do now 9/10 times, but the cover is added to the dbase and the "original" one is then removed... lost 'forever'., so if you add a title later, or new users, don't have that choice ! Quote:
Ace_of_Sevens: The OP says nothing about photoshopping the existing scan, just any images with cosmetic improvements. Photoshop is one of the many possible programs used to make cosmetic changes. So maybe an additional rule could say: Cosmetic changes (color and sharpness) are only allowed on a own newly scanned image !Another possibility could be to keep all images (same dimensions) and that the user can select the image it want  ! That way you could also have various releases images for the same title too. |
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