Blurring seams...Please don't do it!

[DARPA]

Everyone who's into scanning hates images that straddle magazine creases. Invariably some real estate of the image that spans the crease is lost during the printing process. How much depends on how the magazine was put together and how thick it was. Those factors also play heavily on how easily it will be to get a good scan of the image.

There are two types of people who handle scans that span creases: a) Those that just put the magazine pages in a way to scan the whole thing including the crease (provided it's not so huge that this can't be done) and b) those who stitch the two pages together from separate scans.

I'm not out to judge anyone who doesn't want to stitch. We stitchers know what a pain in the ass mag stitching is so I won't look askance at anyone who doesn't want to deal with that crap. It sucks.

But if you're going to not stitch, I humbly request that you don't try to blur the crease to cover up any issues that show up as a result of not stitching.

Take the following example I have here.

A cursory look at this image reveals that the page on the right is askew compared to the page on the left and, partially as a result of that, a large amount of an image from a totally different page in the magazine is visible at the center/seam.

I totally understand why one would want to blur this. You want to obscure the part that doesn't belong as much as possible. But let me make the case for why you shouldn't do this.

By covering up this filler material with a blur filter, you are creating permanent damage to the image and that in turn makes it harder for anyone else to try and improve upon the scan by doing image surgery (i.e. stitching).

Below is an image I stitched together from the original image. I basically took the right page and rotated it until it was straight-ish and then joined it back to the left page. However, because of that blur the stitch job isn't as good as it could have been.

To be fair, I have to say that this image was going to be a problematic stitch job even without the blur filter. Sometimes you get an image that when you rotate it straight the seams of the two pages still don't line up properly or too much of what the seam should show is missing still. That could be due to any number of factors such as the printing process, the magazine binding, or how the image was scanned. There are certain steps one should take for scanning images for stitching that one doesn't need to take for scanning an image all on one page. Those steps maximize the available page real estate you get from the scan, which you won't get (and don't need) when you're scanning a page that has the image(s) just on that page.

Obviously people scan for themselves primarily and everyone has their own likes and dislikes in regards to scanning. I just want to point out why I think the blurring of seams is a bad idea in practice though I understand the reasoning behind why people would want to do that. In my view blurring the seam should only be used as a last resort after everything else, including stitching, has been tried.