Cover Art

At ICP Studios where I work, we're doing a book to mark our 40 years of existence. The bulk of the project is displaying the cover art of the 1500 or so records we've worked on over the years, each page having 9 pictures of 8 x 8 cm with artist and title below each entry.

It's been my job to find, format and optimize each of those pictures. Some I photographed from the actual LP and CD covers, some I've had to search out on the web on sites like Discogs. For the records made in later years, mainly since about 2000, the job's been relatively easy as the quality of the on-line material is usable for the most part. The problem with the earlier records is that back in the day there apparently wasn't much importance placed on documenting album art, especially for the less famous work. And naturally we wanted all the pictures in our book to be artistically top notch.

So I set to the task of optimizing poor quality images, not only from the on-line sources but also from photos of actual LP albums (from as far back as the early 80's) which hadn't been looked after well. I delved deep into the depths of Photoshop working on this project for over a year, mainly as regards getting low resolution images resized to print quality without distraction of noise, fuzziness and digital artifacts.

In this example, I found a picture of an album we did in the 90's which was on sale on eBay (left). It was the only picture I could find with the special edition cover showing the actual studio setting in the background. I started by using a perspective crop tool to bring the sides straight and create an 8 x 8cm x 300 dpi image. It wasn't too difficult getting the colors and contrast right, but the reflections of the plastic CD cover needed to be worked on manually to reconstruct the content underneath. The finished version is on the right.

A labor of love. But that's just the way we roll on my planet.