Volunteer CD Covers! Working Thread

Post by **annise** » August 26th, 2018, 2:17 pm

3 covers caught .......... and linked. Thank you both

Anne

Salvationist · Post by **Salvationist** » August 26th, 2018, 6:02 pm

The cover for "An Outback Marriage" can be found here: https://librivox.org/uploads/covers/Salvationist.zip

I believe the word "sqauttoracy" in the blurb is intended to be "sqauttocracy".

I just read the comments about there being slim pickings for album covers lately. I believe I've only ever had two unfulfilled claims at a time apart from series preclaims, but I'll try to slow down my claiming frequency here on in.

amitsharma · Post by **amitsharma** » August 27th, 2018, 1:38 am

Hi,

Here is a cover for: Pollyanna (version 4) by Eleanor H. Porter: https://librivox.org/uploads/covers/pollyanna_v4_porter_1808.zip

Book's Librivox catalog page: https://librivox.org/pollyanna-version-4-by-eleanor-h-porter/

PD status of images used:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_H._Porter#/media/File:EleanorH.Porter.jpg
https://pixabay.com/en/girl-vintage-victorian-background-1001973/
https://pixabay.com/en/flower-floral-bouquet-background-1646041/

warm regards,

Amit

mahne · Post by **mahne** » August 27th, 2018, 3:36 am

Hi,

cover for: https://librivox.org/the-crimson-cryptogram-by-fergus-hume/
can be found here: https://librivox.org/uploads/covers/crimsoncryptogram_1808.zip

Cheers
mahne
___________
Took picture from here: https://pixabay.com/en/background-blood-blood-stain-1759447/
Turned it, made it darker and some slight changes for legibility reasons.

Post by **annise** » August 27th, 2018, 5:18 am

Thank you all
Salvationist's linked

- and it's squattocracy I guess - think he sort of made it up . squatters claimed themselves large areas of grazing land

in the early days and some prospered and were sort of the lords of the manor.

Mahne's linked

Amitsharma linked .

It's another beautiful cover but the pdf file is very large. I'm not an image handling expert but it is very very big compared with the others today for example, the 3 I've just done have pdf's of 174K and 565K and yours is 14.7M . I realise yours is a more complex imagery but that's a lot of storage , a lot of upload time (took me about 4 mins to upload to Archive) and a lot of time for users to look at and download and probably higher resolutiomn that most of people ink jet printers need, so could you experiment with your resolutions to see if you can use lower quality without affecting what we see in the catalogue? Im happy to try same pictures different resolution if you wish somehow , I'm sure I could think of a way to do if you need suggestions from others I'm sure they would help - I make mine in an 800X800 pixel box , and use many book covers and book illustrations which aren't available in high resolution, so I'm not much help

Anne

https://www.investintech.com/resources/blog/archives/4180-reduce-large-pdf-file-sizes.html had some thoughts that I'd never had. Thanks MaryAnn

amitsharma · Post by **amitsharma** » August 27th, 2018, 6:56 am

annise wrote: ↑August 27th, 2018, 5:18 am ...I'm not an image handling expert but it is very very big compared with the others today for example, the 3 I've just done have pdf's of 174K and 565K and yours id 14.7M . I realise yours is a more complex imagery but that's a lot of storage , a lot of upload time (took me about 4 mins to upload to Archive) and a lot of time for users to look at and download and probably higher resolutiomn that most of people ink jet printers need, so could you experiment with your resolutions to see if you can use lower quality without affecting what we see in the catalogue? Im happy to try same pictures different resolution if you wish somehow , I'm sure I could think of a way to do if you need suggestions from others I'm sure they would help - I make mine in an 800X800 pixel box , and use many book covers and book illustrations which aren't available in high resolution, so I'm not much help

Anne

https://www.investintech.com/resources/blog/archives/4180-reduce-large-pdf-file-sizes.html had some thoughts that I'd never had. Thanks MaryAnn

I was using the print default of 300 ppi (that's the default around the world as far as I know) but I can bring that down with commensurate drop in quality to around 500kB or any other suitable size. If you want me to reupload this same cover with smaller size, please let me know and I'll ZIP it upload again. Thanks for the heads up.

warm regards,

Amit

Post by **annise** » August 27th, 2018, 2:21 pm

It would be a good idea , lets do that and see if it's satisfactory ( I don't have any pdf editing program)

Anne

commonsparrow3 · Post by **commonsparrow3** » August 27th, 2018, 2:25 pm

https://librivox.org/uploads/covers/annualreportseducation_1808.zip

Cover for: https://librivox.org/annual-reports-to-the-massachusetts-board-of-education-by-horace-mann/

carthinius · Post by **carthinius** » August 27th, 2018, 3:03 pm

annise wrote: ↑August 27th, 2018, 2:21 pm It would be a good idea , lets do that and see if it's satisfactory ( I don't have any pdf editing program)

Anne

I do have one! I tried to "optimize" it with Acrobat DC, reduced transparency and merged image layers. Maybe you can give it a try, it's now around 2MB.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AbvmrwUGKTFf_Gs80ieaYbwc_ZTChDuW/view?usp=sharing

Post by **annise** » August 27th, 2018, 4:08 pm

That doesn't seem to have lost much on the screen so hopefullyit will stilll work at lower resolutions. Lets see how Amit gets on , it's probably better when one has all the originals to adjust.

Anne

amitsharma · Post by **amitsharma** » August 27th, 2018, 10:36 pm

Thanks for your help Anne, here is another version: https://librivox.org/uploads/covers/pollyanna_v4_porter_1808.zip

Its under 1 MB now. But I may have compressed it too much at the cost of quality. If that is so, please let me know and I'll reduce the level of compression but with a proportional increase in file size.

I have kept the text as vectors, since I have no idea which fonts I am allowed to embed, and compressed the image to 80 dpi.

Since I am the newbie here, it might help if in the first post of this thread a file size recommendation is given, like 1 MB or 2 MB. The online resources that come up during a google check for print quality PDF files all suggest a 300 dpi value for bitmaps. So even when the online image was less than that, I increased it to 300 dpi to fit that standard.

carthinius wrote: ↑August 27th, 2018, 3:03 pm I do have one! I tried to "optimize" it with Acrobat DC, reduced transparency and merged image layers. Maybe you can give it a try, it's now around 2MB.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AbvmrwUGKTFf_Gs80ieaYbwc_ZTChDuW/view?usp=sharing

Thank you carthinius. I can see Acrobat DC did a great job but I don't have that and this is something I would need to incorporate in my workflow locally for each cover in the future.

Thanks to everyone for helping out.

ciao,

Amit

PS. Though I have done only four designs, in order to let everyone get a chance to do covers, I will also cut down my claiming frequency.

Thanks.

carthinius · Post by **carthinius** » August 27th, 2018, 10:48 pm

amitsharma wrote: ↑August 27th, 2018, 10:36 pm I have kept the text as vectors, since I have no idea which fonts I am allowed to embed, and compressed the image to 80 dpi.

I worked with Corel Draw once, too. If I remember correct, there were different flattening options for images. I used to incorporate the text in the flattening progress, since the text effects were always something causing bigger files. If you flatten your image with the text included at 300 dpi, there will be no difference in printing it.

carthinius wrote: ↑August 27th, 2018, 3:03 pm I do have one! I tried to "optimize" it with Acrobat DC, reduced transparency and merged image layers. Maybe you can give it a try, it's now around 2MB.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AbvmrwUGKTFf_Gs80ieaYbwc_ZTChDuW/view?usp=sharing
Thank you carthinius. I can see Acrobat DC did a great job but I don't have that and this is something I would need to incorporate in my workflow locally for each cover in the future.

You‘re welcome! Acrobat is a powerful tool, yes, but it‘s not that inexpensive. I think there are lots of options in Corel, Indesign and Photoshop to try before you should consider buying a new program.

Post by **annise** » August 27th, 2018, 10:59 pm

Thanks , I'll download it when I'm on my computer
PDF size has not arisen before since I've been doing the links - I'm not sure why and as I said I'm no expert on image processing - I just leave the settings that come up. I wasn't really involved in the beginings of covermaking , which has just grown from someone making one and asking could we show a link somewhere on the catalogue page to them being part of the finished product after the latest software change so I'll have to do some research

As to claims - there is no need to slow down if you are enjoying it , the flow of new projects is variable , and it doesn't take much variation in flow to have famine or feast

Anne

amitsharma · Post by **amitsharma** » August 27th, 2018, 11:49 pm

carthinius wrote: ↑August 27th, 2018, 10:48 pm I worked with Corel Draw once, too. If I remember correct, there were different flattening options for images. I used to incorporate the text in the flattening progress, since the text effects were always something causing bigger files. If you flatten your image with the text included at 300 dpi, there will be no difference in printing it.
...
You‘re welcome! Acrobat is a powerful tool, yes, but it‘s not that inexpensive. I think there are lots of options in Corel, Indesign and Photoshop to try before you should consider buying a new program.

This is a Win-7 computer running a very old CorelDRAW v12 released in 2003 and there's not many options for flattening images. I checked.

I don't know about Germany but Adobe products are prohibitively expensive in India for personal use. Another reason why I shifted to Linux for my main work after things became rentals.

annise wrote: ↑August 27th, 2018, 10:59 pm ...PDF size has not arisen before since I've been doing the links - I'm not sure why and as I said I'm no expert on image processing - I just leave the settings that come up. I wasn't really involved in the beginings of covermaking , which has just grown from someone making one and asking could we show a link somewhere on the catalogue page to them being part of the finished product after the latest software change so I'll have to do some research...

Hopefully these teething pains should subside once I get an acceptable workflow going. The only settings I found in CorelDRAW (my v12) were optimization for Editing, Print, Web, or Document Distribution. I took the Print version and ended up with the larger size.

I will still juggle with a few more settings just to see what each one does. If the current PDF has background images too distorted for use, please let me know and I will increase the resolution till the file size is around 2 MB (if that's an acceptable size) like the Acrobat file above carthinius helped out with.

Amit

terrybenn · Post by **terrybenn** » August 28th, 2018, 4:22 am

I'd like to pre-claim the cover for It's Your Fairy Tale, You Know.