Pity the cover is damaged by mould but this is my third stitch and a pretty good result all round. If anyone has a cleaner copy feel free to replace/edit mine but at least we have a picture till then. Didn't know Johnny was born to "loose", check out the typo.
Welcome Lee, nboldock gives good advice, it doesn't take long to get good results with a camera/smartphone. We made the image size slightly bigger because there is more detail on LP sleeves.
There are two main ways of doing the covers, using either a scanner or camera/phone.
- To do with a scanner; assuming you have an A4 (standard size) scanner you will need to do four separate scans to get the whole cover in four parts. Make sure they are overlapping parts. Then download Microsoft ICE (free), and use it to automatically join the four parts and make one image (go to "New Panorama" and simply point it to the separate image files). This gives a fantastic result BUT is of course time consuming. So it's the best quality result, but takes the longest to do.
- Alternatively, take a photo of the cover, preferably with a digital camera, but we have already seen that smartphones and iPads also give decent results. You want to switch the flash OFF and take the photo in natural light, really. Near a window perhaps. Take the photo as square as you can, crop it (without losing any of the cover), then use the Perspective tool on your chosen graphics package (I use GIMP) to straighten the photo and make the cover nice and square. Crop it a little around the edge again if needs be just to tidy it up. Resize it (I go to 700 pixels wide) and all done!
The camera method sounds more work than it is and to be honest you can get them done quite quickly with a bit of practice. The best way is to wade in the deep end and try it!
Just migrated here from 45cat and this is my first entry on this site. I will upload label scans soon, however, it looks like cover shots are going to pose some problems any advice for a novice? And by the way when did the image size go up from 7 to 800, never mind that's easy to adjust to.