Subject:
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Sticker Scans [was Newish Idea for LUGNET]
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.database
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Date:
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Thu, 21 Feb 2002 18:54:26 GMT
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Hello TWS, hello everybody,
let me say that I think your data quality tracking idea makes a lot of sense
to me. Of course, you are also right when you say that its implementation
will take a dedicated team, lead by someone with the right set of skills and
capabilities.
In this posting, let me elaborate a bit on one of the related points you
touch in your posting: The Sticker Guide.
Far from trying to create a "sticker guide", a while ago I decided I would
scan some of the stickers of sets I had sitting unbuilt. Also, I got a few
other people to send me scans of their unused sticker sheets. I quickly
found that, in order to be useful, sticker scans must be of significantly
higher quality than instruction scans (especially for small stickers). They
also need to be post-processed, to retain that high quality when compressed
to reasonable file size. Here are the points I found important when I
scanned and processed my sticker scans:
* Scan at 600 dpi or at least 300 dpi in full color
* Be sure to have the horizontal and vertical lines exactly
straight [1]
* Don't compress the scan in the first place
* Use your favorite graphics program to convert the image to
indexed color, then reduce the palette of the image to as
few as possible colors [2]
* Clean up any spots of wrong colors in large uniform areas
* Clean up any other imperfections you can see in the image
[3] [4]
* If you have scanned and worked at 600 dpi, scale the image
down to 300 dpi
* Save your work as a compressed GIF [5] [6]
You can see the sticker scans I have already processed this way at
<http://horst-lehner.mausnet.de/lego/aufkleb/index.htm>
The page is in German, but even if you can't read it, you can see the
stickers at 75dpi, and will be able to spot the download links for the
300dpi versions.
I also have scans of some more sets sitting on my hard disk to be
post-processed, but since my priority currently is to finish building my
LEGO room, they will probably not show up on the site any time soon. Of
course, if anyone feels like they want to scan AND post-process some of
their unused sticker sheets, I will gladly host them on my site, giving
appropriate credit.
I hope to eventually put the sticker scan page of my site out of business,
when a sticker guide database emerges. Until then, what I can do is limited,
but IMHO still better than nothing.
Greetings
Horst
[1] Even just one pixel of deviation will make further processing steps
a lot harder and less effective
[2] Photoshop can do this job quite nicely, but there is certainly other,
less expensive software that is as good, because most of Photoshop's
features are not used in the process
[3] That could be stray pixels along straight edges, or imperfections of
the original print, for example
[4] Usually, it took me multiple iterations over the reduce palette/clean
up loop to get to an optimum result
[5] Usually, the result you end up with has only very few colors on uni-
form areas, and therefore compresses very nicely when saved as a
compressed GIF. Bringing the original scan to the same size by com-
pressing as JPEG results in significantly lower quality, usually
unsatisfactory for printing in original size.
[6] Transparent stickers are a special case. What you get through scanning
is the background color of your scanner's lid -- not very useful. I
recommend using a colored background paper, with a color that does not
exist in the sticker sheet itself. During post-processing, there is
two possible ways to threat this color:
* Change it to some level of gray that can be easily distinguished
from all the other colors in the finished sticker sheet image.
This is suitable for people who want to print on paper, because
they can easily replace this gray by the color their background
bricks will have, in the specific model they are printing stickers
for.
* If your graphics program allows you to, you may want to change
this color to transparent. This would be ideal for people printing
on transparencies, but may be harder to use for people printing on
paper.
For now, I have just one transparent sticker sheet, which has been
post-processed according to the first of these options, but that
should be easy to change in case people feel the second is better.
--- EOF ---
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