The Art of Final Fantasy IX Scans! (Page 2) | Final Fantasy Series | Forums

Final Fantasy Online Forums > Video Gaming Discussion > Final Fantasy Series

The Art of Final Fantasy IX Scans!

< Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next >

05.03.2012 5:45pm

Kaiser
aka Nick Walker/Disdain

Ah I've got this one, it's a fantastic book - can't remember where I got it from though!

Jump to Post

05.03.2012 5:49pm

Thread Creator

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

It is by far the best artbook for Final Fantasy, I think. Only The Sky ranks up there with it. I just wish they would come out with a book like this for each FF. Why was FFIX the only game to get something like this?

Also, I would love an exhaustive Nomura art book like they did with Amano. Despite all the belts and zippers, I still love his stuff and it is notoriously hard to find since it never gets released outside of promotional stuff and the occasional concept piece in the Ultimanias. What's up Nomura? Why so stingy?

Jump to Post

05.03.2012 8:58pm

kirbenvost
Give Life Back To Music

Free Spirit said:

It's actually really nice. As you can see, the artwork is nifty if you like that sort of thing. The soundtrack is, of course, a great bonus and the tracklist booklet that comes with it has all the songs' names in English, which I thought was quite convenient. Don't know if the proper OST has them in English as well.

Beyond that, the packaging itself is top-notch, and really looks great just as a mantlepiece kind of thing. It's no Lunar Eternal Blue, but it's pretty good overall.

Darn, definitely regretting it now. At first I wasn't impressed by the soundtrack but there are definitely a lot of good tracks in the game. Ah well, can't have it all.

Jump to Post

05.03.2012 11:04pm

Mavilu
Yep, still gaming

Free Spirit said:

I have the Visual Art Collection, and was actually planning on scanning that too. Never heard of the Established Files, though.

Is this it?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Final-Fantasy-IX-9-Art-Book-RARE-/270773899585?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f0b61d141

Huh, I have that one (I had to import it used from Japan), but I didn't know there were any others, I'll have to see if I can get them.
Thank you for the scanning, FS!.

Jump to Post

05.03.2012 11:05pm

Thread Creator

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

I actually ended up buying that book from eBay that I linked to. Should arrive in a couple weeks, and then we'll see what we got!

Jump to Post

05.03.2012 11:08pm

Mavilu
Yep, still gaming

Well, from what I see, it's not as complete as yours, there aren't that many world concepts, among other things.

Jump to Post

05.03.2012 11:10pm

Thread Creator

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

From what Enkidoh and Aquila said, it's more of a V-Jump pre-release special edition type of thing, so I'm not expecting it to be as comprehensive as the actual Art Book. It looks like it does have some preconceptual stuff in it that can't be found anywhere else, though, and even if there's only two or three unique images in it, it'll be worth it to me.

Jump to Post

05.11.2012 2:21am

Thread Creator

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

Okay, I have a question before I get too far into scanning The Sky. How do people usually prefer these kinds of images? I've been scanning them at 96 dpi(which my scanner says is web quality), saving them as bmp's, and then cleaning them up and converting them into jpegs for uploading.

This of course means they will be smaller and have less resolution when I upload them, but at the same time, they will load much faster, and not be ginormous screen-breaking 9000 x 9000 images. It also takes significantly less time to scan at 96 dpi as opposed to 300 dpi, which my scanner says is printer quality. I have found 300dpi is necessary for text-based scanning and very small pictures, but not sure how much of difference it really is for images that are already quite large on the page.

So basically, what do you, the viewer, want? The only reason I'm doing this is because I want these images out there for people to see and appreciate, and I want to put them out there in the most convenient, and yet still high-quality, way.

For comparison of the different extremes I'm talking about, here are some examples. These are all scans of the "Behemoth vs. Warrior of Light" image, which is unfortunately very small in The Sky (the 96dpi version is the actual size of the picture if you were to paste it onto your screen). I have a larger version from Dawn, but it is very slightly cut off on the left hand side, since the image goes right to the spine.

96dpi jpg version
96dpi bmp version
300dpi jpg version
300dpi bmp version

And for the extreme perfectionists, here is the FFwiki version, and a 300dpi bmp scan of the biggest version of this image I could find among my books(the one from Dawn that is cut off on the left edge):

FFwiki version

My version (very big)

Now, you'll notice the FFwiki version is darker and sharper than any of my scans. This is not the way the image actually appears in the book, and I assure you mine is a picture perfect scan that hasn't been altered in any way. I don't know if they touched it up or just used an inferior scanner, or got the image from some other source besides the art books(like, say, they ripped it from the FFI PSP art gallery). But the result is a different look to the image, and I would like to know which people prefer. This may seem like a lot of trivial comparison, but if I am going to be scanning 1000+ images, I want to do it in the way people want to see them.

Jump to Post

05.11.2012 7:45am

kirbenvost
Give Life Back To Music

I'm probably not your main audience, but the 96dpi ones look good from a distance (regular zoom) but quite pixelated the further in you get. The 300dpi obviously allows you to get in closer and see all the details, and in an image like that, that's a good thing. However, being really time-consuming is no good. Perhaps a middle ground?

I can hardly tell the difference between bmp and jpeg, honestly.

Jump to Post

05.11.2012 1:31pm

Thread Creator

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

As far as jpeg vs. bmp, neither can I to be honest, at least not at 100% zoom. If you zoom in to about 300% you can start to really see the artifacting going on due to the jpeg compression. It's a lot more noticeable when you have large areas of one color, besides white. Some of the Amano images have blood-red backgrounds to them, and you can really see the artifacting on them. It's also a lot more noticeable on black and white images, which Amano is very fond of. And text, of course.

And 300dpi scanning takes about 10 times longer than 96dpi scanning. I can scan an image at 96dpi in about 10-15 seconds. It takes 2-3 minutes to do the same thing at 300dpi. That's a huge difference when you're scanning an entire book. I might try out 200dpi and see how long that takes and what the quality difference is between them. Because 300dpi is a chore. I scanned about 50 pages worth of text-based images from my other books(the FFIV and FFVI weapon lists) at 300dpi and it took forever.

What about the FFwiki image? I don't want to go mucking around with the original image, but if people prefer Amano's stuff to look sharper and darker like in the wiki version, I can do it. One of the problems with Amano is that he likes to work with a very light hand.

Jump to Post

05.11.2012 2:39pm

(Edited on 05.11.2012 at 3:57pm)

Kal
yes

The wiki version probably got a good dose of contrast and saturation tweaking, the darks and the lights are burned out, although the colors look more vibrant. Notice how the tree in the background pretty much disappears. I think it's a little extreme.
In your version, the colors look a little washed out, but if you say that's the way they look on the pages of the books, I'd say leave em like that, as it's probably what they were intended to look like, a lot of Amano's subtle use of colors is gone in the wiki version. Watercolor is an extremely hard medium to scan, but I'm sure the people who worked with an artist of Amano's caliber know what they're doing.
Imo, I think you should try to aim for a middle ground to make the images pop a little, by pushing the contrast and saturation a tiny bit in the scanning software or editing them afterwards in photoshop (a script can do that kind of stuff automatically although you would still have to check each image individually)
If you want help with retouching I can assist.

Here's a visual example of what I mean.

Of course this is all a matter of preference, I like contrasted images as long as all the details and subtleties are kept.

edit : Also, since you're scanning material that's been printed (ie. degraded compared to the source material) there's little point in scanning in bmp (unless you want to heavily work on them so you can make prints). It takes much more time and files are much heavier too. Scanning in 300dpi jpeg should be more than enough for any kind of use that doesn't involve print.

Jump to Post

05.11.2012 4:10pm

kirbenvost
Give Life Back To Music

Honestly the wiki version doesn't look right. You can tell in the original one that he used a lot of light pencil/brush strokes for detail and the weirdly over-saturated colors of the wiki one take that away. Kal's retouched version looks pretty good, so maybe something like that is good, but honestly if the original is true ot how it looks in the book, there's no need to go out of your way to do a ton of retouching.

Jump to Post

05.11.2012 4:31pm

Thread Creator (Edited on 05.11.2012 at 4:39pm)

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

Eh, basic retouching is as simple as a click of a button, and can even be automated, as Kal suggested. It's just a matter of keeping the integrity of the original. I do think Amano's stuff could use a little darkening and such, simply because what looks good on a piece of paper in real light can look not quite as good on a backlit computer screen, even if the image itself is identical. I think will go about the length of Kal's touching up. That's actually looks like what I started to do when I first scanned the image and was playing around with it, just to see what kind of things the wiki image might have had done to it and how much. Maybe I'll do it on a case by case basis. Some of Amano's stuff is very clear, crisp and sharp and does look like that bottom Behemoth image. He really has an incredibly wide range of artwork.

And don't worry about "not being my audience". If you're posting in this thread at all, you obviously care about it enough to have an opinion. Just think - what's you're favorite FF, and if you were handed all sorts of artwork for it that you'd never seen before, how would you want it, ideally?

I'm going to try rescanning some of the stuff I've already scanned for The Sky(so far I've only scanned the FFI section of the first book, so it's not too bad), and try and do it at 200dpi, slightly touched up like in Kal's example, and in jpeg format. If 200dpi still takes a long time, I might just suck it up and go 300dpi. If it's gonna take a while, might as well go all the way.

Thanks for your opinions, guys. And thanks Kal for recommending this scanner. It really is a beauty.

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention, that big one you used for your comparison, Kal, was taken from the Dawn artbook, where it's much bigger. The smaller ones I linked to are actually from The Sky. I've noticed that the images in The Sky are much closer to what your retouched version looks like than the same images found in Dawn, which all seem a shade lighter(although the tradeoff is the Dawn artwork tends to be much bigger, since the book is much bigger, dimension-wise). I suspect this difference is because The Sky is a much more highbrow artbook, and they probably took greater pains to accurately transfer Amano's work for it than they did for Dawn, and other places where his art can be seen. How does that 300dpi jpg version look to you?

Jump to Post

05.11.2012 4:56pm

kirbenvost
Give Life Back To Music

Sounds pretty good. Hopefully 200dpi works out for you though, because 300 is really time-consuming.

Jump to Post

05.12.2012 4:27pm

Thread Creator

Free Spirit
Zetta Member

200dpi worked pretty well. Nice big images, half the scanning time of 300dpi. I managed to rescan everything from FFI, as well as scan and gather up the new FFI art Amano did for the remakes and ports.

http://www.espritduo.com/Amano/FF01/

Now onto FFII!

Jump to Post

< Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next >

Jump to