Arcade Section: restoring some flyer images that have been questionably edited

[kurzih]

Just wanted to let you know, while I'm uploading missing flyers (mostly Japanese ones), I'm trying from time to time to re-upload some scanned flyers in the Arcade section if I see issues.

I'm trying to put back some very good quality scans in the Arcade sections that have been, in my opinion, put in a worse state than what they were originally. Mostly there has been over-killing with painting so that the background color is monochromatic (single hue) and making the colors "pinkish" and very strong/unnatural were some red turns into more pink than it should be for example  - most of these kind of edits have been uploaded in PNG format. But less talk more images:

On the left the clearly edited one, and on the right the original scan (both from the same source)

Issues: overbrightness, too heavy on the colors, upper background is missing the dots that are supposed to be there and doing that paint-job has caused the text to partially vanish. 

In detail, click the images to open them in full size:

Same here, while trying to "clean" the grey texture the text takes a hit:

 

And here's an example for Donkey Kong, where the green gradient (going from slightly darker/lighter) has been wiped out completely and the black edges are blocky instead of smooth:

This is also a request to the developers to please add more image types so we can have fan-made edits/reconstructions for those who hate to have any scratches and prefer extra-clean looking/uniform images and for us who prefer to keep high quality scanned images as much as untouched/authentic as possible with only minimum changes that are mostly unseen (like cropping if the scanned image has background not belonging to the image/centering etc.).

I've discussed about my opinion earlier here. By the way, the person who made those uploads in the Amiga section changed his behavior to a more respectful approach keeping it to the rules - thank you!:

EDIT: Found an excellent example of that over-bright/over-colorized issue:

Here the logo just doesn't stand out like it does on the original scan.

The skin is way too red/not natural and so is the basketball. I'm afraid there are hundreds of Arcade scans that have been overwritten with these kind of edits... if anyone would like to help re-uploading the original scans, you can find most of them here: https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=archive&db=videodb

 

Edited January 4, 2022 by kurzih

[Freestate]

Launchbox database is created to feed an emulator frontend. Not a place for preservation. I agree with the point of being acurate in cleaning or restoration. But in an eye candy environment, arranged images are better. It doesn't make any sense to value a scratch or damage in images. We are dealing with images from decades ago, all of them require som degree of restoration. This was an old debate quality is over strictly preservation. 

Not all of your examples are valid. Someones is true that are burned or altered in main textures, but others are simply colour corrected due to sunfading or damage in surfaces.

Edited January 24, 2022 by Freestate

[kurzih]

That's not really the point, is it? In a way emulation is preservation, but that's not the topic here. And this has nothing to do about candy, because not everyone likes the same. Eye of the Beholder - good game, but also has meaning here.
My stand on scratches and nostalgia, you can read that here:
https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/60984-please-do-not-destroy-original-authentic-box-images-with-photoshop-edits-upload-them-separately/

And, as stated before some images require minimum edit that do not affect their authenticity. If you can't see it's edited then it's the perfect kind of restoration. But I'm perhaps too good at spotting the differences, many people couldn't tell that a lot of SNES images have been filtered with waifu2x or something similar that makes a curly look to the image - like the one you defended in that thread above:



I use mostly BigBox when launching games, so every image is bigger there and all details are better seen.

The real problem here: To be honest I'm getting sick and tired about the attitude issues that has absolutely no reasoning of the fact that we have image type tags for all kinds of images. If you want to "arrange", "clean", "monochromatic paint", "rewrite the texts in your own font",  "re-size into uniform mold", "copy paste age rating/logos/quality seals" on any image, that's totally fine! But then you should upload it separately as an edited image using the reconstruction tag. There is room for every type. It's just unbelievable when some selfish or ignorant behavior results in a perfectly good scan being overwritten instead of leaving the choice to the Launchbox user to choose what image they want to download! I don't think anyone has the right to dictate that his reconstructed work should be the only image everyone should be able to download. I personally have already told my stand that I prefer authentic, mostly untouched images rather than let someone do some work on them that in my eyes stick out like hell - but I also I'm not one to delete or overwrite reconstruction or fan-made images that have the proper tag attached to them - I appreciate the effort and It's great that we have choices for all camps:



We even have this on the database rules & guidelines if you still haven't noticed:

Front and Back Box Art must have the proper regional tag and be added to the proper category.

• Reconstructed box art can not be used in any other category then the reconstructed section.

I'm fully aware that some people have no respect for the rules and just want to drive their own agenda (what on earth is that obsession about "owning" the default image??). But Launchbox is supposed to give everyone the free choice on how they build their collections - choose your own default image type, ie. Box - Front - Recon or others  (in image priority settings) - the more image choices, the better. This is more of an attitude issue, than opinion or technicality.

Examples? I could fetch hundreds of edits from the database with many faults, like typos in where text has been re-written with someone's own choice of font etc. there are countless of images that have been overwritten with edits that have been misleading moderators because of their "bigger size" and in preview mode looking OK. Not everyone is paying attention to details, but I am, and it bothers me when I see something that isn't they way it was originally, and someone's opinion on how it should look takes priority and overwrites the original image with an edit. Plainly disrespectful to others like me. And those examples above are all valid, those are not color corrected, the colors are simply wrong - almost neon-bright and unnatural. There were worst looking examples for sure I could have taken.

Anyway, those Arcade flyers have mostly been replaced with even higher and better quality scans than the old ones (approved by all moderators) - so it was actually a good thing to do. It took me a full week to do that - time that I would have liked to spend on something else if someone would have been kind enough to use the proper image types in the first place. I've been contributing for about three years now and added thousands of missing images and probably 2000-3000 missing commercial games (with full source-checked metadata, not uploading just a 3D Box etc.) to the database and now I'm not happy at all if those hard-to-produce images will be improperly overwritten and lost forever with edits that should be tagged as reconstructions.

I don't think I have the energy to carry on that much if it goes to waste at some point. And even less energy to argue about it. So, hopefully developers @Jason Carr @C-Beats will give their opinion about this, because I'm done with this topic.

Edited January 24, 2022 by kurzih

[Freestate]

21 hours ago, kurzih said:

Many people couldn't tell that a lot of SNES images have been filtered with waifu2x or something similar that makes a curly look to the image - like the one you defended in that thread above:

I use mostly BigBox when launching games, so every image is bigger there and all details are better seen.

The real problem here: To be honest I'm getting sick and tired about the attitude issues that has absolutely no reasoning of the fact that we have image type tags for all kinds of images. If you want to "arrange", "clean", "monochromatic paint", "rewrite the texts in your own font",  "re-size into uniform mold", "copy paste age rating/logos/quality seals" on any image, that's totally fine! But then you should upload it separately as an edited image using the reconstruction tag. There is room for every type. It's just unbelievable when some selfish or ignorant behavior results in a perfectly good scan being overwritten instead of leaving the choice to the Launchbox user to choose what image they want to download! I don't think anyone has the right to dictate that his reconstructed work should be the only image everyone should be able to download. I personally have already told my stand that I prefer authentic, mostly untouched images rather than let someone do some work on them that in my eyes stick out like hell - but I also I'm not one to delete or overwrite reconstruction or fan-made images that have the proper tag attached to them - I appreciate the effort and It's great that we have choices for all camps:



We even have this on the database rules & guidelines if you still haven't noticed:

Front and Back Box Art must have the proper regional tag and be added to the proper category.

• Reconstructed box art can not be used in any other category then the reconstructed section.

I'm fully aware that some people have no respect for the rules and just want to drive their own agenda (what on earth is that obsession about "owning" the default image??). But Launchbox is supposed to give everyone the free choice on how they build their collections - choose your own default image type, ie. Box - Front - Recon or others  (in image priority settings) - the more image choices, the better. This is more of an attitude issue, than opinion or technicality.

Examples? I could fetch hundreds of edits from the database with many faults, like typos in where text has been re-written with someone's own choice of font etc. there are countless of images that have been overwritten with edits that have been misleading moderators because of their "bigger size" and in preview mode looking OK. Not everyone is paying attention to details, but I am, and it bothers me when I see something that isn't they way it was originally, and someone's opinion on how it should look takes priority and overwrites the original image with an edit. Plainly disrespectful to others like me. And those examples above are all valid, those are not color corrected, the colors are simply wrong - almost neon-bright and unnatural. There were worst looking examples for sure I could have taken.

Anyway, those Arcade flyers have mostly been replaced with even higher and better quality scans than the old ones (approved by all moderators) - so it was actually a good thing to do. It took me a full week to do that - time that I would have liked to spend on something else if someone would have been kind enough to use the proper image types in the first place. I've been contributing for about three years now and added thousands of missing images and probably 2000-3000 missing commercial games (with full source-checked metadata, not uploading just a 3D Box etc.) to the database and now I'm not happy at all if those hard-to-produce images will be improperly overwritten and lost forever with edits that should be tagged as reconstructions.

I don't think I have the energy to carry on that much if it goes to waste at some point. And even less energy to argue about it. So, hopefully developers @Jason Carr @C-Beats will give their opinion about this, because I'm done with this topic.

I'm the one who spent thousands of hours to complete snes media database, and yes i use waifu 2x to restore somes images. With all respect, i think you are missing the point that we are dealing with material that is decades old, and in many situations untraceable. Not all platforms have as much premium art and preservation effords as the arcade flyer ones. Using filters and tweaks is a must when the only way a contributor has a source for box is something like this:

 

and with a lot of work you can turn it into something like this

Promoting absolute purity as a rule in the main media, we have seen that it ends up resulting in a lot of damaged and dirty material, without any type of restoration that hurts the eyes in a frontend environment that seeks to reproduce a satisfactory experience, not a place of archaeological analysis . Sometimes, as i said, the only way is heavily restored images.

The use of filtering or waifu techniques is to avoid compression artifacts, they do a really good work when the image is downscaled and in a not massive presentation in bigbox. Yeah i know that in a 4k tv yu could see the restoration, but the alternative is compression artifacts, dust, scratches, ripped parts, That's what the users want in a frontend? Twink twice.

I'm also getting sick  as a huge contributor and moderator to spend thousands of hours to restore some rare images to find out, some of them replaced by others tha are heavily dirty & distorted, not cutted, full of damage and absolutely pure crap, because other users (that only borrow sources from heres and there) think are legit and pure.

I totally agree with being the most acurate in restorations, and i did my best in my restorations and revise them every time i find a better source. But a well restored imaged without damage is always preferable if the alternative is having the main category full of crap and the good quality and cleaned images are all in reconstructed tag. We talk about this issue many years ago, And keeping in mind that almost any image needs reconstruction or cleaning, If their differences with the original are not excessively striking, position-ratio changes in some elements, lack of them or a very visible use of elements outside the original image, we consider them valid for the main category.

I understand your frustration @kurzih, but the main problem is that there are too many users who should not have moderation power. Because they give ok status to any ultra-deteriorated garbage. If the main category were not such an unfortunate and unusable catch-all where almost anything is approved, it would not be so belligerent. You get frustrated because there is some slightly altered image and you prefer greater purity, and I am sure that some of those images have been the one that has restored them roughly because I or other user was tired that day and taking into account that when scaling it the native texture does not it was almost visible and that it was displayed clean in the frontend not giving it so much importance.

In my case, for example, seeing some of my hard restorations replaced by a higher quality image but with some damage, when I restored it again I worked with that new image, but being more respectful of the original colors and textures. . What I will never tolerate is seeing images with cracks or visible damage or dirt.

To finish, not all the images that have a bump in contrast are incorrectly altered, there are those that have clearly faded due to the sun, friction or chemical reaction after so many years. Also, increasing the contrast slightly is sometimes useful for disguising many fine-grained blemishes or dirt that require messy work.

Edited January 25, 2022 by Freestate