I have finished cropping out the scans of all my OverPower cards. It took about 36 hours to scan them all in and probably about 60 hours to crop them all. The OverPower cards have rounded corners and I don’t like to have them showing up on my website because it’ll either be transparent or white.
Luckily, with Photoshop CS 5, I can fill in the missing corners with Content-Aware deletion. I created many Actions to help me automate this process but it still took a while as the process was never perfect. Cropping out the images from the scans were also pretty easy with Photoshop’s Crop and Straighten Photos tool. Again, it wasn’t perfect because some of my scans had cards that were too close to each other. In then end, all of the cards (minus about 50 of them) are processed and ready to be created into PNGs for the OverPower website.
Photoshop doesn’t have a nice tool to batch ‘Save for Web’ on directories with sub directories, so it was a manual process to select each folder for exporting.
And here’s where OptiPNG comes into play. After creating any (regularly visited) PNG for the web, I always run it through OptiPNG to shrink it down further. I don’t understand the algorithms behind it but it works. OptiPNG gives you an option to select optimization levels, with the -o [0-7] flag. Zero being nothing, 7 being sufficiently optimized. Basically, these levels sets up parameters for the program to brute-force compress the PNG file and finds the best type of compression.