I thought I was sure about the interpretation of a rule but seeing the overwhelming number of no votes on my contribution (7 no, 0 yes) I thought it's worth to ask for clarification:

It was my understanding that in all cases, we are required to submit scans of the actual covers, over promotional material taken from the Internet, even if the actual cover scan looks much worse due to embossing, reflection and what not.

The case in point is Coraline Blu-ray with slipcover. The cover currently in the system is this one:

Clearly, this is promotional material taken from Amazon or another site, as it it still up in lower res at this site:
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/2415/coraline.html
Or check this site. It's a pure copy-paste of the promo-cover they used:
http://www.bluraywire.com/2009/06/05/coraline-blu-ray-cover-art/


So I scanned the cover, the actual one, tried my best to clean it up. Of course it looks much worse than the promotional material (it's reflective and embossed) but I thought the rules required us to submit this one:



So the question is: are we allowed to use promotional material if the majority rules the quality of an actual cover scan is too poor compared to the promotional material? I thought not but I'd like to check to make sure I'm not misinterpreting the rules.

Images provided are those from Inception, not Coraline.  But in this case, I think the clarity of the promo image outweighs the letter of the rules, since they are by and large the same.

Quoting ninehours:

Quote:
Quoting xradman:

Quote:
Images provided are those from Inception, not Coraline.

Weirdly I'm seeing images for Thunderbirds 

I think the links that Taro used are the ones associated with the last image evaluation we viewed in our voting queue.

I'm seeing Lost Season 8. 

Quoting Taro:

Quote:
It was my understanding that in all cases, we are required to submit scans of the actual covers, over promotional material taken from the Internet, even if the actual cover scan looks much worse due to embossing, reflection and what not.

I don't think "we" are required to submit anything, especially if "we" can't improve on the image that is already accepted, for whatever reason. I would have no problem with a better scan, but as things are I would just leave it alone until someone better equipped can fix it.

Sorry, I fixed the links by uploading the images to an external server.

Anyway, so what I get from the responses is that we follow the general rule where we use only actual cover scans, unless the actual cover scan is of lesser quality than the promotional material, in which case we use the promotional material? Did I interpret it correctly?

I think it would be useful to update the rules a little bit then, because that really wasn't clear for me.

Another example with the steelbook of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan.
This is the current scan in the online:


This is the promotional cover art:


With the previous in mind, would I be allowed to replace the existing by the promotional cover art scan because it looks better?

Quoting surfeur51:

Quote:
Quoting Taro:

Quote:

With the previous in mind, would I be allowed to replace the existing by the promotional cover art scan because it looks better?

IMO, yes, not because "it looks better", but because it is closer to what we see in front of the real cover. The problem is that a scanner does not give a correct representation of a reflective cover so another method giving best results to represent what we see seems better for me.

I agree. I don't have this release, but in principle, and judging by the scans provided by Taro, I would certainly prefer the promo cover.

Quoting Taro:

Quote:
I thought I was sure about the interpretation of a rule but seeing the overwhelming number of no votes on my contribution (7 no, 0 yes) I thought it's worth to ask for clarification:

It was my understanding that in all cases, we are required to submit scans of the actual covers, over promotional material taken from the Internet, even if the actual cover scan looks much worse due to embossing, reflection and what not.

The case in point is Coraline Blu-ray with slipcover. The cover currently in the system is this one:

Clearly, this is promotional material taken from Amazon or another site, as it it still up in lower res at this site:
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/2415/coraline.html
Or check this site. It's a pure copy-paste of the promo-cover they used:
http://www.bluraywire.com/2009/06/05/coraline-blu-ray-cover-art/


So I scanned the cover, the actual one, tried my best to clean it up. Of course it looks much worse than the promotional material (it's reflective and embossed) but I thought the rules required us to submit this one:



So the question is: are we allowed to use promotional material if the majority rules the quality of an actual cover scan is too poor compared to the promotional material? I thought not but I'd like to check to make sure I'm not misinterpreting the rules.

I can't see any significant changes in the cover except yours doesn't look as good. So if I had seen this I would be voting No as well.

I've always considered the quality of the image to be more important than the source of that image. I would also vote yes to mock-ups and composite images as long as they were an improvement over the current and accurately represented the actual cover.