Cover Images

Great quality on the Takion covers you uploaded. Hope it is ok that I resized and sharpened them a bit.--Tenzel Kim 14:01, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Absolutely, my screen is a bit off for the moment, must get a new one. Could you please give some info on how you like'em so I can get it right the first time? Resolution, size, format etc.? That goes for bio illustrations as well. --Daha6439 17:57, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Generally I make the cover illustrations at 395x610 pixels as that is about the size they show up at when you click the image to go to the image file page. If the image has some smudge or spine grease or something I usually try to do a bit of correction of those areas. Also I try to get the blacks to be actual black as originally intended (but not always the case when scanning old books). If the black is not supposed to be completely black then I don't edit it of course. To get the best quality I usually work from scans at around 650x1000 pixels that I then resize and sharpen a bit. Personally I use Paint Shop Pro, even if it does not have all the great features of Photoshop mainly because it is extremely easy to use.

Biography illustrations I set at a width of 250 pixels, so that it does not take up too much space at the top but is still big enough to get a decent image. For teams and horisontal character images I sometimes go up to 350 pixels to get decent images. I have considered whether it might be a good idea to be able to have a larger version of those images available as well so on my hard drive I sometimes save a larger version as well just in case. I also add two borders to the images (of a 1 pixel width each). To the very edge of the picture I add a white border and just inside that border I add a black border, to frame the image a bit. Biography images are the ones I do the most editing on as I don't like having any kind of text on them. So I do a lot of copy/pasting and edit our text by trying to finish the image in a way that looks nice. I often do some color correction, getting the blacks black and try to see if I can make old material look more recent by attempting to smoothen out the old dot stuff and getting solid colors instead. Often a lot of work, but the bigger the initial scan the easier it is to fix such stuff and then resizing at the end. That way what might not be completely good on the big picture might look great when resized.

Did this help any?--Tenzel Kim 19:06, 27 July 2010 (UTC) Forgot to say that I prefer to save as png's as they have more colors than gifs and are a lot sharper than jpeg's.