22 October 2025

One might think that I should have remembered to check things before scanning ALL of the magazines? More haste less speed! I had sort of spotted that some of the pages did not quite look right, but reducing the 600DPI scans down to thumbnails always causes some problems with rendering. It was not until I'd actually reordered all of the A3 scans down to A4 that I actually started to look closer and when stripping the assembly instructions, it became obvious that something was wrong. At first I thought that perhaps it was the glossy page which was causing the issue, but when I went to try a test scan with a different contrast to check I found that the settings set I had been using HAD a 25% modification to the contrast which was there to handle the older Model Engineer magazines colour covers. So now I need to rescan the whole lot again without that correction. I've already run the first 6 mags and taken the opportunity to tidy the one A3 merge to eliminate a white line. The Flying Scotsman and the Mallard scan A3 pages are at least both on the centre page and the image on the first blog post has been reworked and now looks much better. THAT should have kicked me up the backside earlier, but at least it's only time I've wasted and the second pass I will address things like the A3 merges and I'll work in batches of 10 or so mags and post process them as I go!

I've identified a few bits that need to use later instructions and new parts to address, but I still need to work back through the 'parts list' to flag where earlier parts need amendments, such as the notes relating to the very first part of the cab, which was amended in a note with part 7 and I spotted modifications to the window frames in a much later mag..

Update: While I can trim the two halves of the A3 pages to remove any gap, PDFArranger will not respect that trimming when merging the two halves. So I may be better off just leaving them as separate pages for the moment until I can do a better merge some other way. Although I have the raw scans I can return to so perhaps the faulty merge is better in the short term.