[Above: raw, original scanned in halves of front of LP,
showing much ring wear & masking tape sticker]
[Above: Finished front cover after piecing halves together,
separating the album elements,
then removing ring wear and masking tape sticker]
These results were achieved primarily with
the use of replace color and paint bucket in Photoshop -
along with paint brushes of various sizes. This cover had to
be worked on within separate "elements"; i.e., the words and
photo had to be cut out and put in separate windows while
the back cover was worked on, as did the "WB" shield, album
catalog number in the upper right hand corner and the
"Printed in the U.S.A." at the lower left hand corner. These
elements were then placed back onto the cover later on and
then the finished cover was resized for use on the Jobim and
Ogerman sites on bjbear71.com.
[Above: one half of the back of the same LP, showing
discoloration, ring wear, and lots of pen marks on the
tracklist!]
This particular copy of "A Certain Mr.
Jobim" was apparently used by DJs as it was a mono promo
album and heavily written-on on the back cover. The
ring wear and discoloration were mainly taken off with
adjusting contrast and brightness, along with using replace
color to whiten the cover to its original state. However,
the tracklist was a different story, and to remove each bit
of pen mark from it would have required a pixel-by-pixel
restoration that would have taken me several days to finish
and also would have been extremely tedious to do. What I
opted to do instead - for now - was to remove the worst
of the pen, as much as I could. Some of it would have
to remain and because the album is mine, I can scan it in
again later on and do a complete restore when time
permits. The photo on the top right - showing
just the tracklist - shows the work "in progress" as I had
removed much of the pen marks originally there from "Side
One" and still had much of "Side Two" yet to do . . . When
you are doing something like this, it is a given that some
of what should remain will get inadvertently removed as
well, so the black text also would have to get a "going
over" once all the blue pen and red pencil marks were
removed. The below photo shows the results I
achieved from going over this entire back album cover within
one evening's time:
FILLING IN WHAT'S NOT THERE:
[Above: left half of front album cover and the "window of
repair" for the cut corner]
The above left photo was part of a scan received for an album which had a corner cut off. In order to restore this to perfection for use on the discography, I had to figure out what was missing and if it could be restored the way the album originally looked. Otherwise, I would have had to leave it the way it is. I do not own this album myself for reference, but it was apparent that the letters could be easily enough duplicated because I had other letter samples to copy and paste from. It also was logical that the black background continued to the end of the cover with the red line going all the way across to that side.
The red name letters were separated from the
rest of the cover and put in a window by themselves where
they were then worked on to restore what was missing from
them and also to restore the two completely missing letters
from the end of the name, the "N" and "E". I had another "N"
and "E" to copy from in the rest of the name, so that part
was relatively easy. I then isolated the cutoff corner and
put that in a separate window within Photoshop so that I
could fill in the black background. At that point, drawing
the red line in freehand could not be accomplished so that
it looked like it was always there. So I had to highlight
the part of the red line I had from the original and copy it
within Photoshop so I could repaste it over and over until
it reached the end of the window (making several layers of
the separate window). Then, all the window's layers were
merged down and repasted back into the original cover half
to fill in the album's cut corner. After cropping, resizing
and merging down the layers again, the completed album cover
was then ready for use on the discography. The entire
procedure, including merging this half of the cover with the
other half for a complete front cover photo, took about 50
minutes.
Front cover of album with restoration complete.
PHOTO RESOLUTION AND IMAGE CAPTURE
[Left: photo taken at 640 x 480
resolution; Right: same frame taken at 1152 x 768
resolution]
These two photos were taken from the
identical frame in a DVD concert but two different screen
resolutions were used as well as two different
utilities/programs utilized to capture them for the Ogerman
discography on bjbear71.com. The photo on the LEFT was taken with the iREZ
"Reel Eyes" program which is a good video and still photo
capture program but must be used at comparatively low
resolution; the photo on the RIGHT was taken with "Grab", a
free screen capture utility that comes bundled with recent
versions of Apple's Mac OS X. As you can see, "Grab" did a
much better job capturing a sharper, clearer image overall
except for the hands - which I could not control. Still, if
it was a choice between sharper hands in the LEFT image and
the sharper, clearer face in the RIGHT image, I went with
the latter as I thought that was the more important feature
to stress in a photo that is used as the opener for the
first page of a discography. Notice that the higher
resolution photo on the RIGHT also has the advantage of
having the eyes look more fully open as well (due to the
sharper resolution).