Salvation for album scanning?

[British]

As you know, I like to scan album covers in. but, this process is time consuming and a pain in the ass due to the fact album covers are bigger than the scan area.

But I was walking by a coworker's cube and I discovered his Mustek Scanexpress A3. It's a big-ass scanner. It's .3 inches short to put in a whole album cover, but...

but.. with my method of scanning albums with smaller scanners(ie scan it 4 times and stitch), I only have to scan an album 2 times and stich. I get about 85% of the cover on one scan, flip it over, and scan the overrun area and stich.

Scans are MUCH more lined up and I have less cleanup to do with the image distorting found on smaller scanners.

Yay. Now I have the fun task of re-scanning all my obscure album covers again on my older machine at work. Oh boy.

[MARV]

I'm big on Clutter. I've used it to get album art on thousands of CDs. Sometimes it may not get an album right or not at all. In that case, I'll just go download the enlarged album cover at Amazon.

http://www.sprote.com/clutter/

Fetch Art ain't too bad either.

http://fetch-art.en.softonic.com/ie/28072

These utilities are good enough for my purposes which are to have thumbnail views of album art in iTunes and my iPod.

<a href="http://www.worldwildlife.org/cetaceans/index.cfm">I dig whales.</a>

[oneno]

I've been using my konika minolta dimage z20 digital camera to take pics of the covers in high res. seems to work pretty well.

<img src="http://www.virginmusic.de/images/cover/150/0724357803526.jpg"><p><font face="small Fonts"> ONE NO

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[British]

The only problem I ran into was the scans on this new scanner are a bit washed out with colors(ie low saturation). It looks washed out compared to my previous scanner on the same album cover. Eh, a little upping of the saturation and it's better.

Then comes the fun 7 hours of clone brush to delete the blemishes. Dang ring wear.

[Frau_Blucher]

I gave up scanning and stitching awhile ago. With cameras getting so much better, a properly taken digicam shot can yeild quick and acceptible results like the ones in this thread:
http://www.nwoutpost.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14129

The keys IMHO are this:

- shoot in the 50-100mm focal length range to avoid wide-angle distortion
- you HAVE to properly white-balance the camera to "tungsten" or shoot RAW (if your camera has this) to avoid that yellow/orange color cast if shooting indoors under regular light
- do not use flash; if you don't have a light kit, shoot under your dining table chandelier where the multiple lights cut the shadows and glare; alternatively, shoot outside in indirect light
- prop the album up under the light at about a 45deg angle and shoot straight on to the album
- use a big aperture like f/2.8 or better to get a high enough shutter speed to avoid blur; if getting blur, use a tripod
- crop, rotate, levels adjust, and sharpen as necessary

You can knock off a bunch of albums very quickly this way.

[obs]

If you're hardcore, get an Epson Expression 10000XL. Big size (12.2x16.5"), big price ($3000+USD). There's the older Expression 836XL that's 12.2x17.2, if you can find it used.