Vox Virtus

Thanks for sharing @DavidTheDavid , I'll play with some slabs on these settings and see the difference. Appreciate it!

Love buying from Barton! Super easy transaction and a true pleasure to do business with. Ridiculously fast shipping and secure packaging. Only praises from me! The early Moonie looks great in the collection. Thanks Barton! Ty

Vox Virtus Kudos Thread Getting this thing started so you super rad boardies can remind me how much broker I am thanks to you!

Legendary Star-Lord 1

It's 9" x 14" actually. Great for standard slabs. Magazines are cut off a bit on the sides. Original art is typically too big.

Mine pales in comparison to some of these GA Gems you guys are posting, but I snagged this key amidst getting outbid the last second on some of the big boys. Not quite enough green for that 35c variant, but not all was a loss!

Same issue on a few different slabs for me the past couple days. Throwing my hat in as well.

Same thing happening for me on multiple slabs. Looks like something's down.

Nice. I'll definitely play with those settings as well. The hardest part is finding that nice medium that works for most the books. Neutral manual really gives a ton of control. Thanks for that!

Thanks! It's weird. On some books it shows up worse than others. It's always in the same 2 places for me: the rib just under the grade and the bottom right corner. I didn't do anything special to mitigate it. Most of those scans were done at night in a dim office which I've read helps, but I can't prove that. The Nova 25 was done in the middle of day with natural light pouring in.

The Best VueScan Scanner Settings I Could Find (HP 8300) Let me start off by saying I searched high and low for the simple solution of just copying someone's settings and couldn't find them for the life of me. So I decided I'm not all that slow and could probably figure it out on my own. After a couple hours playing with every single setting I could find, I settled on what I felt was the best representation of the slabs on hand. So hopefully a few of you can use this post to your time-saving advantage. I've been helped so much over the past couple years by your collective knowledge, I guess this is just my way of giving a little back. So first things first! SCANNER: HP Scanjet 8300 (white background) PLATFORM: Mac APPLICATION: VueScan (Version: 9881.17.206...just kidding, it updated 7 minutes ago and it should update again within the hour ) I'll drop some screenshots here of my settings for you "just give me the goods" type and for the engineers, surgeons, and over-organized collectors I'll post some context below. I'll also make sure I have a before and after shot of our brave test subject Nova #25 (props to Ron C. for the gem). After everything, I'll post a cornucopia of scans from different ages and colors. Every slab I post will be the new CGC case. The older ones can still use these settings, but the new case really shines without that infamous blue tint. Here we go... Make sure that in VueScan you set the Options to Professional (or click the Options+ button at the bottom) That's the short of it. Now for the expanded edition... Like I said earlier, I spent a couple hours really fine tuning this as best I could. Getting the blacks and whites right was by far the most difficult task. Sadly the glare just wouldn't go away, but I didn't think it was awful. It seems to be worse on white comics. The darker covers tend to absorb the light a bit better. Be sure to clean your glass and slabs. I know that should be a no-brainer, but it's the little things that get overlooked easiest. Here I'll focus more on what I did do, rather than didn't. INPUT SETTINGS: The only real thing of note is probably the scan resolution. I only did 300 dpi for simplicity. You could do 100 or 72 and see very little degradation. I tried multiple passes and saw zero improvement even at 600% zoom. FILTER SETTINGS: Restore colors really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as the Red, Green, and Blues go. They "popped" like they should. Part of the reason I used Nova #25 was because of the great inking by Klaus Janson. There are so many deep colors mixed with blacks and whites on that classic cover. Pulling those out of a Bronze Age book accurately was my primary focus. Grain reduction was a surprising touch. Sometimes these high-res scans really pick up every fiber in the paper and it can get a little noisy. The grain reduction set to light made the book still have that textured look, but smoothed it out enough to mimic more of what you'd see with the naked eye. Sharpen was a must. With the deeper wells in these new cases, the scanner actually focuses on the rib/edge of the case. This means that the comic is slightly out of focus. Sharpen corrected that drastically. COLOR SETTINGS: This is where I spent most my time, however, it made the BIGGEST difference. I went from "hey, not too shabby" to "holy cow (insert best Harry Caray impression here)" getting these settings right. Neutral color balance was the best option. It really leveled everything out so I had good control over the final scan. The black point I cranked all the way up to pull those dark blacks as best I could. It was tough on some of my Silver Age and Bronze Age because those blacks look dark gray. I don't know if that's due to ink or age. I set the white point right on the edge. Much higher and it starts to look like a blown out photo. I also wanted to match the white on the books. Moderns are super bright, whereas some of the older comics have an off-white look to them. The curves are where the fine tuning came in. Curve low is a setting that darkens the blacks. Curve high obviously does the opposite and brightens the whites. The detail really concerned me and getting these two settings right seemed to make sure the darkest and brightest colors weren't washed or flattened. OUTPUT SETTINGS: Just the JPEG quality here. I played with several, and honestly, I think I was tripping myself out a bit. The file size reduction wasn't huge for 50 vs 90 so I opted for the higher setting. 50 would work fine if you're concerned with a few kilobytes. There's very, very little degradation in most scans. On a side note, 90 shines with a super busy cover. Explosions or webs, things like that. So how about the results?! Here's a stock setting scan of the Nova #25 vs the updated settings. I could walk you through every scan I did, but this post would be a mile long...wait, it already is. I'll spare you more mileage. Here's a super zoom comparison: Everything really came together after some pretty simple setting changes. None of these were edited in post. They're straight from the scanner to here. I just hate I didn't do this before I scanned like 200 slabs! I hope this helps some of you who've asked about correct settings in past discussions. I know we all like to show off our slabs with the best foot forward. I'd be interested to hear from some of you with different scanners. I know the HP 8300 is kind of the standard around here for slab scanning, but I know there are ton of others being used out there. VueScan really is an incredible tool! I can't speak highly enough of that software. Anyways, enough from me. Best of luck to everyone and happy slabbing! Here are a few more various scans for your viewing pleasure...

One of each, apologies

New Mutants #9 9.8 and #14 9.8

Little late on the kudos, but I snagged a Nova 20 from Ed back in January and he crushed it. Highly recommend! To echo all the others here, he got my book to me incredibly fast. Wonderful experience! Much Obliged! Ty