How much processing for the book covers?

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mfm-ca
Posts: 1
Joined: 18 Feb 2015, 21:13
Number of books owned: 0
Country: USA

How much processing for the book covers?

Post by mfm-ca »

I have been converting some paperback books to PDFs, and I will later be doing the same for a handful of hardback books. In the case of the paperback books, most are being done destructively with an ADF scanner. But some of the more valuable paperback books along with the hardback books will be done via digital camera.

My question is how much effort do people put into fixing up the scans/photos of the covers of their books? With the paperback books, I just used a flatbed scanner to capture the front and back covers. But so much of the scratches, pits, fades, etc., show up in the scans. For the small number I have processed so far, I have spent a far greater amount of time trying to clean up the covers compared to the time spent with Scan Tailor in creating the pages.

Is this to be expected? Do some users just do a basic image/scan and call it a day? It's sort of annoying when in reality I only care about the printed material in the paperback books (the hardback books and a few, select paperbacks are a different story).
jera2
Posts: 11
Joined: 28 Jul 2011, 00:09
E-book readers owned: Kobo
Number of books owned: 1200
Country: Canada

Re: How much processing for the book covers?

Post by jera2 »

For some of my scans, I've done quite a bit of work fixing up the covers.

Sometimes, I use Inkscape (open-source vector graphics tool), put the scanned (camera) image into a layer, and then create layers in front of that for the text, the background-color, and artwork. Then I retouch each of those in whatever way makes sense. When it's all said and done, I delete the scanned-image layer, and I've got an SVG (or PDF) image of the cover that is usually much smaller than the scanned image, and looks better. But it does take up lots of time, so I don't always do this.
BruceG
Posts: 99
Joined: 14 May 2014, 23:17
Number of books owned: 500
Country: Australia

Re: How much processing for the book covers?

Post by BruceG »

When I scan Jackets I also include the spine, I do this for both the front and back.

As I finish up with a pdf file, the covers may use more k's than a text page but not worth worrying about. The books I do already have colour pages to start with.
No changes/improvements are made.
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