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Is 2200px high too small?


kitsunebi

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1 hour ago, hardcorehubz said:

I for sure get what you guys are saying in regards to 600DPI for everyday uses, I don't mind going through the QNAP and maybe uploading the RAWs to the Archive if that doesn't step on anybodys toes?

The biggest benefits of 600DPI and keeping those archived to me is just that it's easier to clean up things at higher resolution and that we don't know what the future holds for displays to where maybe we'll want that large of images. In the mid 90s a 640x480 monitor was pretty sweet but now we're at 4k monitors. So you just never know (Except the limits of the human eye heh)! I'm just saying if we have the images already in 600DPI as RAWs lets get them out there and preserved in more than one place. I'm happy to work on that in my spare time if it's okay.

And I get what you're saying as well.  Monitor resolution will undoubtedly increase in the future.  My point really is that no matter how high monitor resolution becomes, the resolution of the printed page being scanned will remain the same.  So past a certain point, a higher res scan cannot capture any additional information from the images printed on them (though it could perhaps capture some additional fidelity of the wood pulp of the paper the image is printed on.😋

And as for 600ppi making it easier to clean things up in Photoshop - I totally agree!  That's why I scan at 600ppi.  It's also why I clean things up in Photoshop before resizing and uploading the scan anywhere - so that future edits won't be necessary!  Once a mag is properly edited, RAWs are pretty redundant, being of lower quality than the edit regardless of their ppi.

If you treat magazine scans as fire-and-forget (i.e. upload the RAW scans and hope that someone else edits it one day), then absolutely you should release the 600ppi files so that if someone ever decides to properly edit them they can do so.  But that still isn't an argument for why the world needs finished, edited 600ppi scans...😉

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YAY - super long post that no one will read!

TLDR: Wash your hands and stay away from crowds.  And eat your vegetables.  Bye!

This isn't exactly an exhaustive dissertation on the topic, but I ran across this video which brought up a couple of salient points:

 

First of all is the reiteration of what I've said before about how DPI is for printing purposes only and has no relevance to digital resolution.  Also, the fact that adequate resolution is directly related to the size of the media and the distance from the viewer (in a magazine's case, around A4 size held slightly closer than arm's length.)

Also, as I said before, when we read magazines on a computer monitor, it is typically further away from our eyes than a handheld magazine page would be, so we usually view the digital image at a size larger than the dimensions of the physical magazine to compensate.

The interesting points in this video relate to how - the larger the image we're viewing is (and thus, the further from it we typically have to view it to see it well), the lower the resolution can be with absolutely no perceived lack of quality.  As pointed out in the video, a billboard is printed at 15 DPI.  It COULD be printed at 300 DPI (or as some of you would prefer, 600 or higher DPI😉) but the only way anyone would be able to notice the improved resolution would be if they were so close they would only be able to see a tiny portion of the billboard (which is something that no one should ever need to do.)

It then points out that a glossy magazine is printed at 150 DPI.  I'm not sure if this is true of all magazines, since I've seen other sources say magazines are printed at 300DPI.  It may depend on the magazine.  Regardless, it does suggest that scanning at 600DPI isn't really necessary to capture all of the actual printed information in a magazine image (though for editing purposes, larger is easier, so I still scan at 600DPI.)

So again, this argument boils down to two ways of thinking:

1. Magazine scans are something meant to be read.  300 PPI is more than large enough.

2. Magazine scans should be 600 PPI or higher because they may be used for purposes other than reading.

Proponents of #2 have yet to explain exactly what other purposes they have in mind for a scan that's over twice the resolution the magazine was printed at would be...

 

So far as reading resolution goes, here is a more thorough explanation of why I believe that 600ppi is overkill:

Most of us read magazines using CBR readers (though some of you prefer PDF).  CBR was designed for comic books, which often have images and captions spread across facing pages.  Rather than having each page saved separately, a two-page spread is saved as a single jpg.  Thus, a digital comic book file will be composed of a mix of single page jpgs and double page jpgs.  When reading the comic, scrolling down a single page will go from top to bottom.  Scrolling down a double page will go from left to right, then down, then left to right again (like reading lines of text in a book) so that the reader can read the panels in a two page spread in the proper order.

Text in magazines, however, almost never stretches across two pages.  Thus, when we edit magazines, we do it with single-page viewing in mind.  Any two-page spreads need to be edited so that they match up if the reader is using two-page view mode, but each page is saved as a separate jpg so that the entire magazine can be read one page at a time.  Some people may VIEW the entire mag in two-page viewing mode, but by design they must READ the magazine one page at a time.

OK, so a modern HD display is 1,920 px wide x 1,080 px high.  When we view a magazine on our computer, we are often zoomed in, so we would want the scan to have a larger pixel height than just 1080.  However, ask yourself how many times you've read a magazine where the width of a single page didn't fit on your display.  Meaning - when viewing a single page, you had to scroll to the right to read a single line of text before continuing down the page.  Literally NEVER, right?  Of course not.  Which means that you would never have any page displayed at a size larger than 1920 px wide.  And I don't know about you, but if I have an image set to fill the entire width of my screen, the field of view is much too narrow, so I ALWAYS have the page displayed smaller than that.  Well, a 600PPI magazine page is about 6400-6500 px wide.  So if you were trying to read a mag at that resolution, you would only be able to fit less than one-third of the width of the page on your screen at once.  You'd have to scroll the entire length of the displayed image to the right 3 times to read a single line of text.

Another way to look at it would be to consider the pixel area.  An HD monitor is 2,073,600 pixels squared.  A 600 PPI magazine page is 31,200,000 pixels squared.  You would only be able to see 1/15th of the page at any given time.  Imagine that.  Cut up a magazine page into 15 equal parts, arrange them in order and try to read them.  Impossible.  No one would EVER (could ever) read a mag like that.  It's just WAY too big for the purpose it was created.

 

And for anyone who's chomping at the bit to say "but we're just future-proofing everything for our 16k displays 20 years from now" I'd direct them to the top half of this post and ask them what good comes from saving the files at a higher resolution than the source material was printed at.  Photos are one thing, since real life comes in...really really high resolution.😋 So bigger is always better (though as pointed out above, it's also unnecessary unless you're trying to view something super close).  But magazines are printed at relatively low resolutions, so scanning them at 1 million DPI doesn't serve any purpose if there are only 150-300 dots per inch actually printed on the page.

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I just scan and upload everything in 600dpi TIF since I believe in future-proofing scans (scan once, never have to scan again if the scan doesn't have any defects). I sometimes level the scans (TIFs in Photoshop can store layers). If filesize is a concern, leveling the pages so that there aren't isn't any paper texture will remove most of the filesize when exporting, and then you can further reduce the size with PngQuant (which, by the way, isn't actually lossless by default -- if you use it at Quality=100, it'll be the same filesize). For pages with detailed art and color, png optimization can mess the colors up since it reduces the colors per page. But for greyscale magazine pages that are mostly just text (like most Japanese magazines), you can crush the hell out of it with pngquant and it'll still look visually identical while being 40% of the filesize.

But overall, for standard magazines, I'm not really concerned with DPI as long as it's clear and legible. 

Moire, though. Man I hate moire, but removing it requires careful work (I use Affinity Photo Editor since it has a great Free-Fourier Transform moire denoise).

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Oh, also, I considered exporting to webp, but it doesn't seem to be that widespread now (despite browsers and even my old image viewer supporting it). There seems to be an ongoing battle between a few new image formats (AVIF, etc.), so it might get replaced anyway, and I don't even know if Google is still working on webp.

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7 hours ago, Habanero said:

I just scan and upload everything in 600dpi TIF since I believe in future-proofing scans (scan once, never have to scan again if the scan doesn't have any defects). I sometimes level the scans (TIFs in Photoshop can store layers). If filesize is a concern, leveling the pages so that there aren't isn't any paper texture will remove most of the filesize when exporting, and then you can further reduce the size with PngQuant (which, by the way, isn't actually lossless by default -- if you use it at Quality=100, it'll be the same filesize). For pages with detailed art and color, png optimization can mess the colors up since it reduces the colors per page. But for greyscale magazine pages that are mostly just text (like most Japanese magazines), you can crush the hell out of it with pngquant and it'll still look visually identical while being 40% of the filesize.

But overall, for standard magazines, I'm not really concerned with DPI as long as it's clear and legible. 

Moire, though. Man I hate moire, but removing it requires careful work (I use Affinity Photo Editor since it has a great Free-Fourier Transform moire denoise).

For the sake of any newbies considering scanning who might encounter this (or for the sake of anyone considering releasing scans that could be approved for Retromags) I have a few things to point out here:

First off, everyone keeps using the term "future-proofing."  I've pointed out before how 600dpi is unnecessary and will always be unnecessary (due to the size and resolution of printed magazines being an unchanging variable).  The best way to future-proof a scan is to make a good scan (an ADF scanner is much better-suited to this than a flatbed), edit it well (not just cropping), and save it at a size large enough that it doesn't compromise the quality.  300ppi is absolutely good enough for this, there is no question there (remember, the point of this thread was to suggest that 2200px high might be too small.  But the fact that 300ppi is large enough and 600ppi is unnecessary wasn't up for debate.)

TIF files are far too large to be desireable to ANYONE except someone who intends to immediately edit them and save them as something much smaller.  A 600dpi TIF page is about 100MB.  So a 200 page magazine would be 20 GB.  Do YOU want to download or store a 20 GB magazine?😂  (Btw, it's true that you can save layer changes to a TIF within PS, but it WILL increase the size.  Saving them with compressed layers typically increases size by 50%, while uncompressed doubles the size)

But I'm sure you guys can figure out for yourselves that TIF isn't meant for archiving.  What I DON'T want anyone to misconstrue is this: "If filesize is a concern, leveling the pages so that there aren't isn't any paper texture will remove most of the filesize when exporting, and then you can further reduce the size with PngQuant " 

"Leveling the pages so that there aren't isn't any paper texture" is...bad editing.   Erasing the image completely and saving a blank white page will decrease the filesize, too, but obviously isn't the goal.  Abusing the black/white levels to create an unnatural image is one of the common mistakes made by amateur editors.  Other common mistakes are oversaturating the colors, as well as hitting "auto level" and thinking that you've done something good (never auto-level - that's like going to the barber and telling them "cut it however you like")  Also, I'd like to point out how ridiculous it is to scan a mag in 600dpi and then try to erase the paper texture by over-whitening the image.  Increasing levels to that point harms the printed image - you are actively decreasing the quality of your scan if you do so...so please don't.😋

 

Also...MOIRE.  This is another reason that anyone serious about making quality scans needs to invest in a good ADF scanner.  Moire is a problem indicative of many flatbed scanners.  Some newer, better flatbeds don't have this problem (my current flatbed doesn't create moire, but my old one did - although I scan all of my magazines on my ADF, so I guess it doesn't matter).  Moire looks bad, so people use "descreen" to try to alleviate it.  Of course, what is descreen?  It's a blurring technique meant to blur the image in such a way that you can't notice the moire.  So by default, using descreen makes your image less sharp.  Scanning at 600dpi and using descreen at the same time is like demanding the caterers at your party serve only the finest caviar, and then pouring ketchup all over it.  Or more similarly, like using the highest megapixel camera you can find to take the best-quality photo you can take...and then not using a tripod to keep the image completely in focus.

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Moire is a byproduct of scanning at a high DPI, which makes the injket dots visible. If you don't see any dots when zooming, then it's either at a low resolution, or your scanner software applied some post-processing to get rid of it that you left turned on. My scanner has that feature as well, but I leave it off because I trust my own eyes on Photoshop vs the scanner software making the decision for me.

Anyway, back on topic. Personally I export things to at least 2500px, nowadays going to 3056 (just as long as it's a factor of 2).

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2 minutes ago, Habanero said:

Moire is a byproduct of scanning at a high DPI, which makes the injket dots visible. If you don't see any dots when zooming, then it's either at a low resolution, or your scanner software applied some post-processing to get rid of it that you left turned on. My scanner has that feature as well, but I leave it off because I trust my own eyes on Photoshop vs the scanner software making the decision for me.

Anyway, back on topic. Personally I export things to at least 2500px, nowadays going to 3056 (just as long as it's a factor of 2).

Moire is not printing dots, though they are partly responsible.  You should absolutely be able to see the dots on your scans, because that's what you're trying to capture - the image as printed on the paper.  Moire occurs when scans of those printing dots overlap in such a way as to create a shimmering pattern which is ugly and distracting.  The cause of this is more complicated than I fully understand, but has to do with the interaction of the angle of the scanning sensor with the image on the page, and as I said, is something that more commonly occurs only in flatbed scanners (perhaps due to the scanning sensor moving across the length of the page rather than being stationary like it is in an ADF?.)

I always scan at 600dpi and used to export at 2500px as well, but have recently bumped it up to around 300ppi (usually meaning 3000-3200 px high, depending on the dimensions of the mag)

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Oh, you mean the weird rainbow pattern. Sorry, in the community I scan for moire is colloquial for the inkjet dots that you have to apply light denoise to, so that was a misunderstanding on my part. I'm also not used to referring to the pixel resolution as ppi since manga scanlations get exported as 72DPI PNGs usually.

In any case, when I said "future-proofing", it's a real thing in scanlation because the early 2000s scanners basically didn't know what they were doing and were exporting 1024px JPGs that look awful nowadays. I'm used to scanning in 600dpi because of image editing. Finally, when I mentioned over-leveling, I don't normally do that. I just did that for the Game Critic books since they're printed on garbage paper and are mostly text, so I'm not really losing anything by leveling it a bit to get rid of the pulp (the photos of developers, etc. are dark and blurry anyway). Plus it's easier for ABBYY Finereader to OCR it if it's leveled. It's a case-by-case basis if you want to archive it.

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9 minutes ago, Habanero said:

In any case, when I said "future-proofing", it's a real thing in scanlation because the early 2000s scanners basically didn't know what they were doing and were exporting 1024px JPGs that look awful nowadays. I'm used to scanning in 600dpi because of image editing. Finally, when I mentioned over-leveling, I don't normally do that. I just did that for the Game Critic books since they're printed on garbage paper and are mostly text, so I'm not really losing anything by leveling it a bit to get rid of the pulp (the photos of developers, etc. are dark and blurry anyway). Plus it's easier for ABBYY Finereader to OCR it if it's leveled. It's a case-by-case basis if you want to archive it.

Yes, comics went through the same growing pains, and almost all of those older scans have been redone (although now everything is released digitally).  As I tried to thoroughly explain in this thread, 1024 px would not be adequate, since that is a lower dpi than the image was actually printed at.  But taking a 150dpi image and scanning it at 600dpi doesn't make the image any better.  300dpi is future-proofed already (unless you're planning on printing it later - in which case, sure, go higher).  Going beyond that is pointless, and leads to a slippery slope.  After all, why not scan at 1200dpi?  Or higher?

But again, this is WAY off topic.  This thread was never supposed to be about 600dpi.  That is not and won't be up for debate as a necessary scanning resolution here.  It was only meant to question whether now would be a good time to increase our recommended release sizes to a 300ppi equivalent (they're all either already being released at that size or at the very least backups are stored that way).

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On 3/17/2020 at 8:39 PM, E-Day said:

I'm actually using the Fujitsu fi-7460. It can save TIF format, but I have it set to the highest quality JPG because it's faster, easier to open across the home network and don't eat nearly as much space on my limited network storage as TIFs would. However, when I do the next batch of scanning, I can experiment with scanning as TIF and seeing the storage damage and speed hit when compared to JPG. If I use my flatbed scanners, then they are saved as TIF as I generally don't scan as much with them.

Just try to make sure what exactly is being saved inside those TIFFs. Because a TIFF is pretty much a container, i.e., think of it as a zip, rar or pdf file. It can store lossless images, which is what we need in order to test other formats, like webp (just to make kitsunebi mad) but it can also store jpgs. So, unless you are careful, you may end up with just a TIFF that simply contains a jpg inside of it :)

Anyway, if you are not sure, just scan one page and send the TIFF to me. I can check it out and tell you what is going on inside of it.


As for the whole dpi/ppi discussion, I am with kitsunebi. Don't get me wrong, I am all for perfect preservation, and if increasing the scanning resolution would get more data from the pages, I would say go for it. Even if it is just to upload it somewhere else, somewhere that can store those giant files, and then downscale it again so it can be uploaded here. But if kitsunebi tests are accurate, then it seems 300somethingPI is more than enough. If you guys are already capturing all the data in the page, increasing the resolution will only give us bigger files.

I believe this is what kitsunebi is trying to say - if you take a lens or use your super vision to look at the magazine page and you see the following dots

RWGWB

And then you look at the image you scanned and see exactly the same colored dots, then it means you've already captured all the data that was available on that page. Increasing the resolution will only result in

RRWWGGWWBB

Which is just the same information. So you will just be wasting disk space without adding anything. Now, if your high-resolution scans can somehow capture additional information, then go for it.


The "how horrible early scanned images look today on our bigger monitors" concern is valid, but only if the scans did not capture all the information. If they did, then it is just a matter of telling your image viewer software to resize the image, in case it is too small. No need to pre-upscale them. It will only waste disk space. And remember that CSI software is magic and not available in the real world - if the information is not there, it won't appear.

I bet the CSI image viewer is capable of showing the numbers of those cards in those Duke Nukem pictures...

 

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6 hours ago, E-Day said:

The TIF files produced by my flatbed scanners save lossless as far as I know. Each file is 102MB when it captures the whole surface area of the scanner. I haven't tried with the Fujitsu yet. But I will :)

Huh.  I have some TIF files lying around which I scanned a long time ago and they're all 102MB as well.  To be precise, each one is exactly 107,399,660 bytes. I never noticed they were all the same before.  Weird.  I guess the content/complexity of what's being scanned has no bearing on the filesize where TIF is concerned..

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1 hour ago, kitsunebi said:

Huh.  I have some TIF files lying around which I scanned a long time ago and they're all 102MB as well.  To be precise, each one is exactly 107,399,660 bytes. I never noticed they were all the same before.  Weird.  I guess the content/complexity of what's being scanned has no bearing on the filesize where TIF is concerned..

Correct. All of my color 600dpi scans are the same size before I crop them. Even if I scan a blank piece of paper. It's just a matter of physical scan bed area dimensions x resolution (DPI).

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