I noted that posts of furry characters were unwanted...um...
Wolf and Spice??

Or does that not count because she's human looking...i.e. only completely
fur-covered or scale covered...but a catgirl with ears but otherwise normal
would be fine?

Astara said:

It's Spice and Wolf and no Horo isn't classified as a furry.

Compare these two for example:
Furry
Non-Furry

The difference between the two are defined by human features, which is basically the skin. If the character is covered from top to bottom in fur (chest area, legs, face region, etc.) then it is considered to be a furry. Animal ears or tail are acceptable as long as the charactewr has human body features present.

Just thought I should point out that the proper term for a "non-furry" is kemonomimi.

ecchifan96 said:
Kemonomimi

Blehhhh......*facepalm* my bad. So yes like what Ecchi said, the correct term for non-furries is a kemonomimi. They are the type of girls/guys with animal features that are allowed on this site.

Or anthropomorphic?

Dust -- yeah 1st pic... not interesting, 2nd pic more sol...

Spice and wolf? Wolf and spice?... ARG...I hit the general area...

No, kemonomimi. Anthropomorphic simply refers to the personification of something, like operating systems. Anthromorphs, (notice the lack of "po" in the middle of the word) are personified animals, or furries. Which is NOT a kemonomimi. So, still wrong word whichever you were going for.

good point...hmmm...*kicks self.*...but that other word ...interestingly missing a english counterpoint...

Anyway posted it...seems like it is similar to an older one but ... I am biased.
I like like my version better -- more interesting...and larger just right for a 2560x1600
screen coincidentally...
*cough*

I reparented the other, as I think it might be more reflective of some original. I hope that was the proper procedure?

Astara said:

Yes your post has become the child post and the original image that was submitted here earlier became the parent. However I looked at your post, and one thing that bothers me is the heavy artifacting and some leftover vertical marks that are still visible.

Astara said:
...missing a english counterpoint...

Kemono mimi
Animal ears

Dust said:
Yes your post has become the child post and the original image that was submitted here earlier became the parent. However I looked at your post, and one thing that bothers me is the heavy artifacting and some leftover vertical marks that are still visible.

Where I didn't see any and I have 30" screen...?

Hmmm....

If you say so...
sorry for the bother.

looked again...

are you talking about around the bangs..?? or something else,
cuz thats the only thing I can possibly see... which might be fixable...but
sounds like you are wild about the piece anyway.

Astara said:

First off, you AREN'T bothering anyone, the forums is a place to discuss and ask questions, which is exactly what you were doing.

Second I wasn't going wild or apeshit in any way about the pic you posted. The site has quality requirements, and your pic didn't meet those standards. The pic of Horo that you posted had heavy artifacting that was visible in most areas of the pic (not only the bangs but the rest of her bodyy). Upscaling images can increase the visibility of artifacts unless if you have a way (such as photoshopping) to counter that.

If you're not able to see your picture so well, then you might wanna turn up the contrast and brightness of your screen. Also use the zoom in function (if your comp has one) if it's difficult to see images clearly.

And please don't be hard on yourself, you're welcome anytime to post pics here but read the upload guidelines first if you didn't already. Upload Guidlines

Dust said:
First off, you AREN'T bothering anyone, the forums is a place to discuss and ask questions, which is exactly what you were doing.

Some well stocked, established upload sites have attitude that if you have to ask, you are probably don't know what you are doing and they don't even like responding to things they consider obvious.

Second I wasn't going wild or apeshit in any way about the pic you posted.

Thank-you for clarify, since again, some sites, there mere fact that you uploaded something that they had to press a button to delete is so much work for them, that they take it as problematic -- OR -- leading to the rest of your comment...

The site has quality requirements, and your pic didn't meet those standards. The pic of Horo that you posted had heavy artifacting that was visible in most areas of the pic (not only the bangs but the rest of her bodyy). Upscaling images can increase the visibility of artifacts unless if you have a way (such as photoshopping) to counter that.

...some sites also don't give you enough feed back to know what you didn't do right so you don't know how to correct the problem. The problem with the Holo pic, now that I think about it is that the original scan (one of the few I didn't scan myself), was jpg -- creating problems from the start. I don't know how possible it is to remove all of the artifacting when viewed under sufficient zoom factors (>130%).

If you're not able to see your picture so well, then you might wanna turn up the contrast and brightness of your screen. Also use the zoom in function (if your comp has one) if it's difficult to see images clearly.

To give you some background (and I may be 'sharing too much, for which I say
"komenisai, konachan", in advance!). I have a "Spyder 3" external calibrator I use to set my screen's profile to Daylight standard (6500K) and a 2.2 Gamma (though some of my older ones I tried to split the difference between Mac and PC standards and use a 2.1 Gamma --- but eventually settled on 2.2 as being more universal and providing slightly better range of contrast (when working with very slight gradients 8-bits of color really isn't enough as the human eye perceives about 13-14bits of color at any one time (much larger 'range' over time with adaptation, but at 1 time, limit is about 13-14 max) so even modern 10-bit really isn't enough and that's only usable on HDMI displays right now @ consumer level.

I've 2 displays I use -- but only one is really suitable for image work -- that's a 30" 2560x1600 Dell U3008WFP (previous version of the U3011, which I covet, but can't justify, since the differences between it and the U3008 are not exploitable by any HW/SW I have. Supposedly it does have 10-bit color on the Display Port, but only expensive quadro cards have limited support, that and, I think, only Photoshop CS6 (I have CS5). So -- not having money to burn for a bleeding edge that would be worthless/pointless as most consumer tech couldn't use it and right now 8-bit png's are max quality supported by most browsers/sites -- wait, unless current monitor dies. ;-)

My scanner, an Epson GLX10000, can do 2-page-wide, 16-bit input scans @ 2400DPI native, 9600 optical, but anything over 450-600 is a waste on most material and some stuff, even 420DPI is too much on most stuff. One wall calendar -- even 300DPI was too much on some pics.

I try to make sure I remove digital noise (Noise Ninja -- fractal algorithmic remover does good job at removing pattern noise without the blur effect of most noise removal stuff) as well as any flecks or scratches/imperfections picked up by the scanner that you couldn't see looking at the source image (amazing how digital scanning picks up so much more detail than we see).

For enlarging, if the source is good, Perfect Resize 7.0 has been recommended by veterans on the adobe photoshop discussion group as being one of the few utils worth paying for as it also uses fractal algorithms for it's resizing. Of course it can't add detail that isn't there, but it does a good job of magnifying and properly upscaling sharp line material without making it blurry (within reason!)... Really handy for vectoring or touching up a picture to boost zoom in on it by 2-3X, work on the details, then reduce to display size.

And please don't be hard on yourself, you're welcome anytime to post pics here but read the upload guidelines first if you didn't already. Upload Guidlines

I read what guidelines I could find looking at index and all links from the upload page, but didn't find that exact page. Most of it was covered in stuff I read, but it's more clear about some details -- so appreciate the clarity!

I'd be willing, if it was desired, to upload "size-ratio range appropriate" scans from stuff I've uploaded elsewhere, to add to content here. I don't have large quantities of material I upload since I spend too much time with each one to get it to look right (that and scanning / anime art is only one of my interests). I was more than a little annoyed by having one scan on AP rejected because the scan showed the **shadow** of a nipple under the girl's shirt! (!?!?) -- when I pointed out there were far more explicit shots they did allow and gave an example -- they deleted that one too (wasn't mine)...so I stopped giving them examples (of which there were many, but have not always endeared myself to some of the established folks primarily due to uploading material that usually replaced what they uploaded (amazing what a 16-bit color 2400 (non-enhanced) scanner can do... ;-)). But I found my pics got alot more scrutiny and requirements for them than what other people needed, which made me decide it wasn't worth it.

While I'm a beginning artist, the most on AP. Notably, the 2nd one The New Queen [II], I was told "was impossible for anyone on on MinTok to do". That was said in the context of it's base scan that they wouldn't allow to be uploaded because it would be impossible for anyone on MT to make a wall from the scan. At issue was that mine was a zoomed in view of the central figures @ 6.1kp x 9.8kp but they already had a 2k x 3k version that had dim newsprint type colors, was blurred, and had writing on it. But it was a "full view" they said showing an entire group of people. I tried to explain the difference between a zoomed-in closeup and a widescreen shot, but all they could do was call my scan lower quality because it was unusable for a wall. So, of course, I used it to create my 2nd wall. ;-)

Anyway, you can see some of my scans both on AP and on MT...dunno how many are left after their purge... (under Astara on both sites).

If any are conducive to inclusion here, would that be something people might like?

Should I reduce the resolutions? Some are large (up in the 8x11kp range), others
are smaller down in the 4x6kp range -- of course I'll make sure the proportions fit
for some desired screen ratio (I tend toward 16:10 / 16:9 as my two screens are
such)...

Maybe this can be my introduction if it doesn't make me look bad? ;-)

Hey, its it possible to set one's avatar?

thanks for the answers and patience

Astara said:
Maybe this can be my introduction if it doesn't make me look bad? ;-)

You seem like an O.K. guy to me.

Astara said:
Hey, its it possible to set one's avatar?

Just press the "set avatar" button. It's to the right of every post under "options".

Astara said:
Thank-you for clarify, since again, some sites, there mere fact that you uploaded something that they had to press a button to delete is so much work for them, that they take it as problematic

I just have to say something to that. It's good that you ask on the forums if you cannot figure out what you did wrong from the upload guidelines, however that sentence doesn't really tell the whole story:

It is true that if you take that situation by itself, it's not much work. One would think, especially as a normal user, that it can't be that much work.

The problem, however, is that we have a lot of users. Thankfully only a fraction of those users actually ever uploads anything and most of those are regulars that know what they have to look out for.

But there are also a lot (mostly new) users who don't bother reading the upload guidelines and upload an image of a penis made with ms paint at a resolution of 120x120 (or ten of them). I can tell you that it is a hideous task for us staffers to clean up after such users and that's also why we often don't seem very patient and kill discussion about it quickly.

The problem is this is a never ending story: There seems to be an unlimited number of such users and we have to clean up after them day after day, so cut us (and the staff of similar sites) some slack! :)

Anpan said:
The problem, however, is that [...there are some users who refuse to take a clue even when when you've politely, assuming they even remotely looked like a non-troll, spelled out for them in clear detail(?)...]

I can tell you that it is a hideous task for us staffers to clean up after such users and that's also why we often don't seem very patient and kill discussion about it quickly.

Am I summing up the problem above fairly adequately in my paraphrase?

The problem is this is a never ending story: There seems to be an unlimited number of such users and we have to clean up after them day after day, so cut us (and the staff of similar sites) some slack! :)

Check my submitted scans on other sites and lemme know if you think it looks like anyone could remotely think I'm not making a pretty concerted effort to turn out quality when I'm aware of any problems.

What irks me are staff who don't take into consideration the hours of time spent by some people per/image before uploading. 99% of the time, it's my own scan I'm uploading -- OR ~ 1% of the time, I worked on some existing image I downloaded and have tried to improve it to the point of being noticeable better because I didn't like how the original looked.

But on your subject, I'm pretty sure I understand your grief. Have been a mod of a BB...and rarely being a wallflower, my limits were well tested to see if I'd be impartial even w/respect to anyone arguing against or flaming me ... never had to do anything about stuff tossed my way, and that was usually the worse of the stuff on there (back when I had thicker skin...a nice perk when you are queen(or king).

So if you're interested in checking out my other sites and might want some of that here, lemme know, I should have all the originals in tiff.

Astara

Hope is not too late for a reply, but I think Astara should make an effort to stay. It shows he (?) has some quality material available at his disposal, and as such should be able to gather some quality scans.

If anything, the problem he experiences in most sites is bumping into short-patience admins that think of him as "just another clueless user" and would rather not bother with him. Being grouped up with 99.99% of the other people is usually the right thing to do, except when you are that 00.01% :/

Also, even well meaning individuals can miss out on the rules. The problem is that in many sites the rules suffer from "legalese": there is so much legal text to read through in order to know what is expected of you (and what is forbidden) that in the end your average person has no idea of what he just read and just has to pray his common-sense will carry him through.

SK7000 said:
Hope is not too late for a reply, but I think Astara should make an effort to stay. It shows he (?) has some quality material available at his disposal, and as such should be able to gather some quality scans.

If anything, the problem he experiences in most sites is bumping into short-patience admins that think of him as "just another clueless user" and would rather not bother with him. Being grouped up with 99.99% of the other people is usually the right thing to do, except when you are that 00.01% :/

That could be a perception, but I feel more often like I rise too fast for other people's comfort and made a target for having been able, at various points in time, to put out better stuff than what others could do.

At the time, I was one of few people who had a high quality scanner. Now I see others have followed suit, as I've seen scans tagged with an Epson XL 10000 color profile. With over 2400dpi optical, double page scanning and 16-bit color, I could get some sweet results. It irritated many that a new comer was coming in and and submitting works that ended up replacing many veteran scanner and admin's scans as they'd automatically be higher & better quality.

I just realized now, that I submitted another scan without closing inspecting it first in my enthusiasm to try again. Several of the spice and wolf scans on this site are ones I scanned in and others uploaded (not that this is a problem or issue with me!)...
But...I might have higher res versions -- (that might require more effort to clean
that I might upload if anyone cared for original sizes). Problem was --- I tried
to upload wolf-bathes in png (original is a 73GB tiff)... png cut the size to 58G.
*cough*.

Impractical. So uploaded the jpg... Thing is...after did that I noticed I had a tag on my login about jpeg artifacts... but when I click on it...it shows nothing.

Does that mean you prefer the 58G png?

Also, even well meaning individuals can miss out on the rules. The problem is that in many sites the rules suffer from "legalese": there is so much legal text to read through in order to know what is expected of you (and what is forbidden) that in the end your average person has no idea of what he just read and just has to pray his common-sense will carry him through.

Mega-bingo! Um...how many people read the TOS of all the sites they go to?
Yeah, right...

Astara said:
Impractical. So uploaded the jpg... Thing is...after did that I noticed I had a tag on my login about jpeg artifacts... but when I click on it...it shows nothing.

Hmm... unusual, it's usually only a few moderators in this site who are really good at detecting jpeg artefacts. And you'd expect a scan to not have those... if anything, they could have "scan artifacts" (such as a crease or a gap). Maybe the high-image-size is working against you, because people are tagging the images based on the perceived (scaled) size rather than the full size.

As a "wallpaper" site, I imagine there's a limit to how big an image is to be really considered useful (I resize anything more than 150% the size of my screen, for instance).

Have you considered that the work you scan might have initially been at a lower resolution than you are scanning at? If it was traditionally painted, then of course, higher DPI is better, but if it was a printed, digital work, wouldn't scanning at 300DPI be enough?

Sorry if it looks I am being painfully ignorant of the intricacies here, but I don't see any other people around who'd be qualified to answer properly (Stahn, the one with most experience on these things has been missing for a few weeks now...).

As a "wallpaper" site, I imagine there's a limit to how big an image is to be really considered useful (I resize anything more than 150% the size of my screen, for instance).

post #35442, nah I don't think we've hit that limit yet.

SK7000 said:
Have you considered that the work you scan might have initially been at a lower resolution than you are scanning at? If it was traditionally painted, then of course, higher DPI is better, but if it was a printed, digital work, wouldn't scanning at 300DPI be enough?

Sorry if it looks I am being painfully ignorant of the intricacies here, but I don't see any other people around who'd be qualified to answer properly (Stahn, the one with most experience on these things has been missing for a few weeks now...).

SK7000 said:
Sorry if it looks I am being painfully ignorant of the intricacies here, but I don't see any other people around who'd be qualified to answer properly (Stahn, the one with most experience on these things has been missing for a few weeks now...).

Please don't feel a need to apologize, you will be appropriately punished!... ;-)

(That's how I feel some people take my responses as I tend to respond, in detail, about what is involved so that instead of being painfully ignorant, they can tend more, to be painfully aware... ;-) But so many6 people prefer ignorance (it's Bliss, don'tcha know?), so if my response(s) get too detailed feel free to glaze over... I won't take it personally!

As for the 'painful' part, I learned some time ago that one person's pain is another's pleasure and vice versa... and not to let you think I'm just referring to kink, I remember the comments of someone who was probably in college, when I was waiting in a waiting room or standing in line someplace, and reading something that looked like a textbook -- and someone asked what what my major was or what I was studying. When I told them I was no longer in school, they couldn't understand why someone would continue to read such material if it wasn't required -- and when I said it was 'for fun', pleasure or leisure -- I enjoyed it, they appeared in shock.

But to try to give you an idea of steps I try to go through in a scan -- answering your 300 DPI question (which is not to say everything I post is a scan, but for the majority of things I have submitted as scans this is what was done.

SK7000 said:
Have you considered that the work you scan might have initially been at a lower resolution than you are scanning at? If it was traditionally painted, then of course, higher DPI is better, but if it was a printed, digital work, wouldn't scanning at 300DPI be enough?

Yes and no... ideal is over-scanning by at least 50%. If you scan at 300 dpi, and it was printed at 300 dpi, then you'll get interference patterns -- the scanner may pic up it's 300 dots exactly between the printed dots. So if you want best resolution ideally, you want to pick up the entire moire pattern of the scan, then use special purpose, fractal-based noise removal that does well on moire patterns while affecting the general picture less.

Before you get to that you wanna be sure to clean the pic and your scanner bed of dust and fingerprints.. as they show up as gigantic when you blow things up that much. In addition to overscanning and correcting and reducing, I do the same
in the color space by scanning in 16-bits (48-bits total) which I will eventually reduce to 8 bits for final output -- but I try to do as much work as possible before that conversion so the final result ..

Second, comes good noise removal designed for printed material -- a fractal based prog like Noise Ninja is the best I've found so far and it's reasonably priced. You want something that puts more effort into correcting regular patterns like you get in print than general purpose blurring software.

Third, comes a variable hand-pass process to manually get rid of defects in the print -- dots or lines in the print that could be called 'artifacts' of the printing process. That is usually tedious and can balloon into a long project if the scan you started with wasn't great.

Forth, comes another type of correction -- that of going from printed to video to screen. This is of two types -- correcting for the lower color intensity range of printed media compared to video and secondly relative color balance (which would include 'white point' if you know that term, if not, its part of color balance).

Paper doesn't have the color range of a good monitor -- You can get better color reproduction of reality on a good video monitor than on paper because printed material only reflects light it doesn't catch iridescent or luminance effects that can make scenes look so interesting to our eyes but are too subtle for reproduction in print. Even video is too subtle for true reproduction, but can at least do luminance -- 1 step above print.

Color balance becomes a matter of judgment and viewing conditions (like the monitor you use and what incidental light you have around you). To help in that process, I have a good monitor -- that I keep tuned to to what amounts to about a 20X tighter tolerance than what is suggested (suggested being +/-1.0 ΔAB, where as I usually am under .05 variance). To do this you also need to have your monitor calibrated and keep it calibrated with an external color monitoring device (like the Spyder 3 or 4 products ).

A, hopefully "null" extra step is to review 3&4 above. Sometimes a print or scan source just isn't doing justice to the subject matter. That is only important to your relative 'attachment' to the subject matter (i.e. -- how much you care about the particular subject matter in a particular scan).

The most work I put into this step was in a Inuyasha scan where the scan source had really washed out colors and didn't come close to getting across the essence of the subject (was of Naraku and his friends and the artist for the calendar, I felt, did an inadequate job of getting across his Machiavellian evil and instead had him looking sullen and irritated -- which didn't characterize him well for one of the few pics I'd seen of him).

It took multiple revisions to get it right -- including getting the quality up to scan-level quality for an 8k² scan (as of this writing it was still up @ http://gallery.minitokyo.net/view/452125). I'd probably do a better job if I did it today, than then -- as I've gotten several newer techniques, but that was the closest I'd come to having to make a 'wall' out of a scan, in order for the scan to be acceptable for what I wanted for the subject matter.

I dug up the original and posted screen shots of before and after (i.e. the images are now ~4:3 -- which, BTW -- brings up a point on another thread -- just because a wall is square to start with doesn't mean it can't be cropped at the user's discretion to whatever part they want. I regularly do that with my scans and other people's -- even if the orig wasn't "screen size".

But to see the before and after (it shows the 'Astara' version first, actually, then
the 'raw' version' check out http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143566

I will emphasize that this one involved the most effort for something that I still called a scan, but the ticket there was that the original sucked as a scan or anything, and even though the revised version was completely recolored -- the place where I was posting at the time would never have allowed it as a wall -- because they'd say I hadn't worked hard enough on it --- and it was just a wallpaper sized version of a scan. Had a scan deleted from the same site for exactly that reason -- despite it hitting the number one (or maybe because it hit the number one) downloaded pic in its category. I framed it, cleaned it up, got rid of the writing on it.. yet that's not considered "enough", despite it being well liked.

This was what I alluded to earlier when I said that I've gotten flac from some who didn't like someone who could get such good results and yet was so new to the scene. Not that ALWAYS get good results -- far from it. But if I can apply my brain rather than sweat -- those are golden (but unacceptable on MT and AP).

As a final step -- I'll often **shrink** a scan that was 13-15k wide down into
the 7-9k range, for file size -- but as well to git rid of the "overscan" that I did in
step 1 to get the full source-pixels. And that's USUALLY, the real reason I have a strong scanner, as I can make corrections and shrink them down to be some smaller size and minor imperfections noticeable at full size become not very much so, when shrunk down...

I think those calendar pieces I scanned in were actually well below 300 dpi, so I ended up using about 220 dpi on a few. It's just the sources were about 18x24" -- which is pretty huge for a scan.

And... now I am really curious who would not approve your posts, it shows that (at least for your scans) there was a lot of work invested, and their quality seems to be "obvious." How did "jpeg artifacts" ended up tagged to those past submissions you mentioned? @_@'

Also, some mod will probably suggest you summarize your post using the "spoiler" tags, because they don't like giant walls of text around this site :B

SK7000 said:
And... now I am really curious who would not approve your posts, it shows that (at least for your scans) there was a lot of work invested, and their quality seems to be "obvious." How did "jpeg artifacts" ended up tagged to those past submissions you mentioned? @_@'

Also, some mod will probably suggest you summarize your post using the "spoiler" tags, because they don't like giant walls of text around this site :B

the jpeg artifact that were in my redo of what I called awakening -- her in the hey -- are in the original. They are just fainter because the contrast is lower. Unfortunately, I stayed true to the original focused in about 13.31% and increased contrast around the face area, while lowering it around the edges to give it a framed look. The result was the original artifacts around the face -- which are quite visible at magnification, were 13.13% larger ;-), and had increased contrast -- which had them showing up more clearly. Then the comment was there were more visible lines that might show from sharpening --- but same there -- I made them more visible, but the original has them as well -- thus you see the benefit of only a 13% shrinkage, and a lowering of contrast -- hides a multitude of defects.

Unfortunately, if I want to post a slightly high res copy (larger) in higher contrast, it's incumbent on me to reduce those defects to less than or equal to their previous levels. So I think that's where the artifacts comment came from, but to be fair, the original should be tagged with such, and thus warned, I would likely have put in extra effort to reduce such. Double unfortunately, I don't know of a png or tiff of that shot... so the jpeg damage has already been done .. unless someone can point me at a source I can scan fresh... ;-)

The people who do not approve my posts are the ones who are intimidated by the level of detail I go through -- You won't find 1000's of scans submitted by me like you will for many "veteran scanners", it was that my trickle of scans stepped on the toes of veteran scanners because when one of mine went up, one of theirs was usually replaced/taken down. That's where the rub was. Unfortunately I go for quality over quantity, but worse -- it was a quality that not alot of people were willing to go to the work to meet (not saying they couldn't) but they knew there was no way they could put the quality of my scans without it severely slowing down
their scan rate.

Some scans took as long as a month to get into condition, though many took only a day. Yet that faster speed doesn't come close to equaling those who submit 20-50 in a day...

I do try to break up my text with paragraphs, so it isn't a wall...I would prefer to not have to think about it -- i.e. it would be a great feature addition to the forum software to only display the first 'paragaph, or n lines...', and for long posts, have the BB software auto-collapse any post over that length allowing you to click on it and it would expand (push down lower content) and show the whole thing in-line (not go to a separate page...icky)...now that would be sweet... Then you don't make the users "wrong" for posting long, you just manage your display of everyone's posting to display within a certain space, and let readers decide when to expand...

Computers are there to serve us... they can be objective and always do the same thing no matter who it is that is writing -- and no warnings or problems ever need to develop. Certainly I would want the computer to make such decisions if I was managing a group -- as I wouldn't want the responsibility of having to make decisions about what's allowable or not with every note I read, nor would I relish the idea of having to chastise someone for violating a rule that could have been handled automatically.

I dunno how easy it is though for such a change to be implemented.

post #142059 is a PNG with stray discolouring indicative of Jpeg artifacts.
That is reason enough to delete it because aside from looking messy in an otherwise flawless file format (in terms of preserving quality while compressing) the random noise increases file size.
I've seen the source image on danbooru and I see no reason for dis-colourisation to get into the image.

As for scanning and the process' of fixing such images, you are better off trying http://yande.re

SciFi said:
post #142059 is a PNG with stray discolouring indicative of Jpeg artifacts.
That is reason enough to delete it because aside from looking messy in an otherwise flawless file format (in terms of preserving quality while compressing) the random noise increases file size.
I've seen the source image on danbooru and I see no reason for dis-colourisation to get into the image.

As for scanning and the process' of fixing such images, you are better off trying http://yande.re

---
What does http://yande.re specialize in?

I do not disagree that the png had stray discolouring indicitive of jpeg artifacts.
But I didn't want to re-encode it into jpeg again to introduce more. The original is a jpeg.
Have you ***really*** (sly grin) seen the source image on danbooru? the 1680x2400 @ 935KB jpeg (went and re D/l'it today just to be sure I had the
same source).

Here's the original source image up close:
http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/1307/himag2a.png

There are 2 copies one above the other both blown about 4-5x (blew the shot first
and screenshot the effected areas so I could point to the areas and emphasize
the problems.

The bottom copy is "as is", the top is 2 copies of the photo with the top layer
multiplied -- which will emphasize any color differences to make them more
visible. Both of these are 'raw' as ready in by photoshop.

Notice I posted the comparison in png, so you aren't seeing any additional
jpg artifacts that could have been introduced if I had.

The circled areas are areas where it's VERY noticeable on top and, if you look
closely -- is also on the bottom -- like 4th circle from right notice the green band
in the middle of the orange-brown hair. I didn't introduce that banding in
my picture (I made the mistake of making it more obvious and not removing it,
as I only examined it at screen size -- but blowing mine to 500%, I could see
the problems as well). All of the discolorations in the png that was posted came
from the source, as you can maybe, now tell.

I don't disagree with a decision that the png wasn't good enough -- so please don't think I'm arguing that point. I am working on it --- and may come up with something good enough eventually, but no promises on time. It's hard when I work with other people stuff that has errors in it to begin with, which is why nearly all my work (I think all of it), except for this pic, has been from my own scans.

I'm not completely clueless -- and I know how to see jpg artifacts better than most people if I am inclined toward being critical. I never would have looked for them in the original posted art piece if they hadn't been brought to my attention in my version. Since I know I didn't introduce them... just *cough*, enhanced them!...*doi!*..... ;-)

*peace*? On same page, understand now, I hope, please?

(doing these long comparisons and justifications is so unproductive with my time, but unless people at least have a chance to be educated, they won't know -- that's why I said I appreciated the feed back as to what was wrong -- lets me go dig into why and find out how to fix it! ;-)...(If I can...)

As an extreme, I could do what I did with the Naraku scan I put up on the screen shot site, mentioned above (http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/143566), but that was SOOO much work -- for SO little appreciation of what was involved...it really was for my own sense of "turning out the best I can" more than anything else.
(not that I would have done that 2 years ago expecting I might actually tell someone everything I did and show the comparison 2 years later on some unrelated site)....If you think I have that type of precognition, you'd have to wonder why I still need to do anything for myself -- as I'd have won the lottery many times over...
;-)