(continued)
[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).
PHOTO COMPOSITE WORK
[Left: An image from the internet which contained a picture sleeve I needed but a label that I didn't need. Right: The finished artwork after removing the label and inserting a photo in its place]
I have several listings on the Claus Ogerman site which belong to Caterina and also a photo of the two of them working together in the 1960s. I decided that it would make a nice piece of artwork to merge the two together. After straightening the photo of the picture sleeve, I touched up the edges at the top and bottom left hand corners in Photoshop after sampling the colors with the eye dropper. Then I adjusted the contrast just a tad. The black and white photo I placed in the center hole I had to resize a bit so that it took up the entire label hole - without cutting too much off either Caterina or Claus. Finally, I merged the two layers down to one, resized the new image, and sharpened it. This composite is used at the top of two of the 45 rpm pages in the discography.
