Working with scans

[Quato]

Just so you'll know, I'm picky. My Charlton Scans are altered. They definitely aren't perfect. I want the images to be a pretty close example of what the cover would look like if you were taking my checklist to a comic book convention. Since I don't own the comics, I'm at the mercy of what is available online.

Everything afects quality:

size of scan
dpi resolution of scan
image compression level
lighting
age/browning on the book
physical defects
more

I'm shrinking my scan to a height of 400 pixels because that's a good size to identify a cover and it allows me to use anything larger of good quality and shrink it down.

Here is an example of a comic scan I found online...



It's not bad, but it has one major flaw I don't like.
It has an ugly price sticker on it. It also has a date stamp. If I'm going to tamper with it, I might as well remove the date stamp..

Here is the result after I altered the image. I'm not a graphics designer. I'm a lousy artist.



You may see signed of where I changed an image. The reason is that there was something that looked worse to me.

Defiant1