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Japanese Magazines Scan Project


JhonnyD

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14 hours ago, JhonnyD said:

Man, archive.org file management is such a pain in the ass, if even the slightest thing goes wrong you have to ask for support in the forums....

yup its dumb asking for a URL to get deleted. Why cant I do that? 🤨

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  • 2 weeks later...

Finally found the time to browse some of these. 

My only suggestion is that you could use JPEGmini (trial version here) to optimise the JPEGs before you zip them and upload. It would shave gigabytes off each upload and save you a lot of time and viewers a lot of hassle.

Right now, they're too painful to download (5GB!) and even the PDF/JP2 with huge page sizes are too slow to view on my Mac. I have to download the JP2 zip, and batch process the images to reduce them to an acceptable size to have a good viewing experience.

Just a thought!

Great work though! Keep it up.

Edited by gingerbeardman
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16 minutes ago, gingerbeardman said:

Right now, they're too painful to download (5GB!) and even the PDF/JP2 with huge page sizes are too slow to view on my Mac. I have to download the JP2 zip, and batch process the images to reduce them to an acceptable size to have a good viewing experience.

I'm curious...why would you download the JP2 batch for reconversion?  It's already a reconversion of the original files?  Wouldn't it be better to download the original jpgs in the CBR file if you're going to batch process them anyway?  Or do you have bandwidth issues preventing you from downloading large files?

Anyway...you could always help by editing them and uploading here.  The ones being hosted here are very reasonable sizes.  I think JhonnyD isn't really concerned with making files meant to be downloaded and stored as is.  He's just offering up full-sized 600dpi jpgs so that anyone wanting to edit/shrink/compress them to suit their purposes can do so using the highest quality source files.  Or they can simply be viewed in your browser (I suppose the pages might be a little slow to load if you're trying to rapidly flip through the entire mag, but if you're actually spending any time looking at each page, loading isn't an issue - for me, at any rate.)

The interesting thing about jpegmini is that the same results can be obtained simply by increasing jpg compression when saving files.  Of course, the convenience of the program is that it can decide on an image by image basis what the maximum level of compression that can be applied without noticeably degrading the image is.  So rather than save everything at a consistent quality level of 9 in PS or what have you, it can determine if a given page would look just as good saved at quality level 5 and go with that.

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1 hour ago, kitsunebi77 said:

The interesting thing about jpegmini is that the same results can be obtained simply by increasing jpg compression when saving files.

Actually, this is not true. I'd encourage you to look into JPEGmini to see how it works - it maintains the quality and reduces the file size.  It does not lower quality to lower file size as you suggest. It's quite amazing technology. Try it out. 

To simply read these things in my comic book reader, I'd rather download 250MB JP2 files in 60 seconds than wait 20 mins to download 5GB. Especially with 10 or more mags. I'm looking for specific games and features so I'm flipping through these quite fast. 

We've just had a baby so I don't have time to scan or edit right now. 

Edited by gingerbeardman
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I did research it, but I'll grant you I only spent about 20 minutes or so.  What I gathered was that it was an algorithm that could fluctuate and adjust the amount of compression applied to any given image in order to maintain a quality where degradation would not be noticeable to the naked eye.  If it's something more than that, I apologize.  I wasn't trying to say anything negative about it.  Maintaining visible quality and reducing filesize is what good compression does.  When I said it reduced quality level, that was simply referring to the amount of compression using the terminology used by Photoshop, which is the editing tool I use.  More compression = lower quality level (again, this is just terminology).  It doesn't mean that a quality 7 will necessarily look any different from a quality 12, it means that a quality 7 has been compressed more.  But whereas most of us tend to save every picture in a given project at a consistent compression level, Jpegmini can identify which images won't be noticeably compromised by applying more compression, thus acting as a "smart" compression tool that can compress each image in a project differently while maintaining a consistent quality level.  Again, I apologize if the information I gathered has mislead me in this understanding.

As for ginormous files at archive, I didn't see any files that were as large as 5 GB, but I hear ya.  Regardless of whatever your download speed is, you're always stuck with whatever bottleneck is at the other end with IA, so sometimes their downloads can crawl.  I usually won't download 600dpi scans at all, simply because I have no desire to store files that big permanently, and I'm too lazy and busy with other things to want to download it, unzip it, batch process it, rezip it........zzzzzz. The only reason I downloaded any of these Gamest issues was so I could edit them and put them up here in a format more people can appreciate.

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I have been downloading  the jpg files that you find when looking at the jp2.zip in zip file viewer. Example of what i mean: https://archive.org/download/NeoGeoFreak28199709/Neo Geo Freak 28 1997-09_jp2.zip/

By have the / at the end of a zip or tar you can view the images. But with jp2.zip file you get the original jp2 files and a jpg file. The jpg files are smaller then jp2 files and the resolution is  about the same as retromags.com files size i think. One images i just download from there is 2466x3029. i think we go 2700 for height so these are bit bigger but not by much. Once i download them i can make a pdf using img2pdf on linux.

Anyways i hope this helps.

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1 hour ago, godane said:

 i think we go 2700 for height so these are bit bigger but not by much. Once i download them i can make a pdf using img2pdf on linux.

The main difference between the files here and the files at archive.org is that ours have been edited.  This doesn't just mean resizing - almost every page has had minor corrections applied, such as straightening, filling in uneven borders or staple holes, making two-page images join together more seamlessly, and (in the case of the many monochrome color pages) adjusting slightly to make the text more visible.

But you're right, JhonnyD's scans look very good as-is, so if all you're interested in is a smaller file, you can download the resized/compressed files from the source and stop there.  There's no need to make a PDF unless you just like using a PDF reader.  One of the reasons Retromags doesn't use PDFs is because we don't want to lock our files within a format that can only be read by proprietary software, so we use the cbr format, which is exactly the same thing as a zip/rar file (just rename a zip/rar file as cbr and you're finished.)  That way, should anyone wish to access any of the files within the cbr, all they have to do is open it with a free program like WinRAR for easy access to all of the original jpgs inside.  Manipulating images within a PDF is much more difficult and full control is really only possible if you happen to have a paid version of Adobe Acrobat which costs almost $150 per year.

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2 hours ago, godane said:

By have the / at the end of a zip or tar you can view the images. But with jp2.zip file you get the original jp2 files and a jpg file.

Anyways i hope this helps.

That's a great help for me! I had seen those file listings, but did not spot the sneaky jpg links in there.

I'll download those using jDownloader in future. Thanks! BIG help.

9 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

If it's something more than that, I apologize. 

No need to apologise. It's slightly more subtle than your appraisal but enough to say that what JPEGmini does cannot be done in any other program.

Edited by gingerbeardman
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58 minutes ago, gingerbeardman said:

No need to apologise. It's slightly more subtle than your appraisal but enough to say that what JPEGmini does cannot be done in any other program.

In the sense that it uses a proprietary algorithm, sure (that's why it's a paid program).

But it is just a compression algorithm, and I don't want anyone thinking that other compression algorithms are worthless, because they aren't.  Nor does anyone wanting to edit mags around here have an obligation or need to buy an additional program for jpeg compression before they can contribute.

I just tested the cover to Gamest 5:

The original file is 4961 x 6114 and 11.6 MB.  Without resizing and using Jpegmini, the file was reduced to 8.66 MB.

Again, without resizing, using Photoshop to save the file at quality level 9 (what we typically use), the file was reduced to 8.01 MB (this was the closest I could get it to the Jpegmini result, as quality level 10 did not reduce the file size, presumably because that is what the original file was saved at.)

So although the Photoshop-compressed file was slightly more compressed, the results were not really discernible at 100% zoom, which is MUCH more zoomed in than anyone would ever actually read the magazine at.  Zooming in at more than 200% reveals visible differences - the Photoshop results seemed sharper, but the slight blurriness of the Jpegmini actually helped make the super-magnified text appear more smooth for an overall preferable result.  But again, unless you read your magazines at a size that only allows for a few words of text to fit on your screen, that won't be an issue.  At any ordinary reading size, being able to tell the files apart would be extremely difficult.

The following pics are zoomed in to around 3 times normal reading size to look at the fine print publication details in the upper corner, which is usually the smallest text anywhere in a Japanese magazine.  After running the files through their respective compressions, they were cropped and saved as lossless pngs in order to avoid further degradation for comparison purposes.

Jpegmini 8.66MB file:

001jpgmini.png

Photoshop 8.01MB file:

001PS.png

As you can see, not much difference between the two, either in quality, or in filesize (while the PS compressed jpg was smaller than the jpgmini one, the pngs for both files are both exactly 936kb).

So again, I'm not insulting their program.  Their quality results are at least as good or even better than PS (even if the compression size isn't any better), and they are certainly offering a much cheaper product than Photoshop (albeit one with a single function.)  But no one need feel that it's a necessary purchase in order to edit mags for Retromags.

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I think we're coming at it from different angles.

My point was that on a bunch of images whose quality you are happy with, for example images straight out of a scanner/camera, you pass them through JPEGmini and its automatic process keeps the quality the same, and reduces the filesize dramatically.

Of course you can manually try to match its results, by tuning photoshop export, but that's missing the point. By doing that you're just resetting the baseline of a start image you are happy with. Then you would run JPEGmini on that to get the same visual quality at a lower filesize, much less than 8MB.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Otherwise... we can agree to disagree on this. :)

Edited by gingerbeardman
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I think my only concern is the way you refer to it "keeping the quality the same" as if it isn't compressing and degrading the image.  Jpegmini is a compression program like any other in the sense that it isn't a lossless compression.  So regardless of the program being used, the only way to keep the quality of the image 100% the same as the original is to leave it alone.😀  What jpegmini does is compress the file so that it looks the same to the naked eye.

Quote

JPEGmini is a patent-pending photo recompression technology, which significantly reduces the size of photographs without affecting their perceptual quality.

All it really means is that you won't notice the difference.  Kind of like I couldn't notice the difference in my above test.  I used the file directly from archive.org so that the baseline for both PS and jpeg mini compression was the same.  If you're concerned about the file having been previously compressed before being uploaded to archive, how about this:

Straight from my scanner (and again, at preposterously large zoom):

Saved in Photoshop at Q9:

FamiMaga 056_036 PS.png

and in Jpegmini:

FamiMaga 056_036 Jpegmini.png

Again, the quality is identical to my eye.  In this case however, the original file (15.4 MB) was reduced in size more in Jpegmini (9.55 MB) than in Photoshop at Q9 (11.1 MB).  Of course, I could have always saved the picture in Photoshop at quality level 8...which I also did, resulting in an 8.41 MB file size and an again comparable appearance:

Photoshop at Q8:

FamiMaga 056_036PSQ8.png

There is no difference from taking a photo straight from the scanner and running it through jpegmini vs running it through Photoshop other than the algorithms each program uses.  One may give slightly better results than the other in either size or quality or both (I'd argue that the differences are minimal), but both are just different methods of compressing a jpeg.

Yes, you could take a file straight from a scanner, compress it in Photoshop, then compress it again in Jpegmini.  Likewise, you could compress it first in Jpegmini and second in Photoshop.  But why would anyone subject the same image to multiple compressions?  Eventually that would degrade the picture enough to be noticeable even at less zoomed-in sizes.

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19 hours ago, DragonQuarter said:

I got some Capcom Club magazines that'd I love to scan. Don't have access to a high-quality scanner though 😕

I had them back in the day but sold them, if you want to donate them you can ship to some member near you in order to get them scanned.

About the whole jpegmini debacle, I'm just dumping my raw scans on archive servers, from there the users can do as they please:

1) Get the raw and edit, resize, manipulate, whatever you want

or

2) Get the pdf or look at the online preview if you just want a quick look at the content

Nowadays 5GB are not that much, I can manage them easily with a 8 year old laptop and a standard retail internet connection

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2 minutes ago, JhonnyD said:

Prepped the first Neo Geo Freak issues, these costed me an arm and a leg back then, and they weren't even in top conditions.

That's fitting, considering the Neo Geo itself cost an arm and a leg.  Adjusting for inflation, the system (released in the USA in 1991) would cost $1,200 in 2019 dollars and individual games would cost $370 each. 🤯

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Don't tell me that, was a Neo Geo AES collector back in the day (started around 2002-03 I think). After not being even able to find two of my favorite games (Slug 1 and Ultimate 11) I just decided to quit it and sell everything.

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