http://www.pireze.org/blog/?p=2313

These scans (like most of his) look washed out to me. Maybe it approximates how the paper looks when held next to the monitor, maybe it's even how it was intended to look; I'm not sure, but as a matter of taste, I just find it hard to look at on a monitor.

So I'm just posting this one for levelling feedback before doing them all. The original is post #24742. This sample is levelled with 20, .95, 248; alternatives welcome. I don't want to over-level but it might be possible to improve the contrast a bit more.

I've also cropped off the black area around the edge, which also doesn't look great on a monitor. I may crop the white area and text, too. The actual posts will probably be high-quality JPEG (the levelling is slightly lossy anyway) with the original PNGs as children.

pireze never does auto contrast/levels, which kinda sucks...

edit :

see post #24780

this was just transformed with 1 click (read: --ONE-- click) using PS and the original image

I usually avoid auto levels because it tends to overadjust, and without having seen the original it's hard to tell if I'm making it darker than intended.

One trick is to create an adjustment layer, set it to auto levels, and to set the opacity on the adjustment layer, so you can use auto levels to pick the ranges, and then tone it down as wanted...

I never got how to use the level layer >.< Pretty much i just adjust it till i get the right result ^^

ps: What exactly is a "sample" tag?

I just stuck it on there because it's not the final image (and I turned compression way up).

empty "levels lines" (far left, far right) are simply wrong and too white/dark, arent they ?

and i changed CONTRAST not LEVELS...
theres autolevels, too, but with different result