Open kruegp opened 1 year ago
Thank you for adding a detailed post. To regurgitate what was discussed in discord. The original intent behind the change was to:
As we discussed in discord, I did not consider things like Landscape books, which will always then have a bad cover in Kavita.
In terms of design, what we see in Komga and Amazon are no go for me. In my view, they do not look good and is not something I would want Kavita to have. I am 100% open to discussion and making a change as long as it will work on the majority of user material (books, webtoons, manga, and comics).
I will leave this to some discussion from the community.
Hello, I would like to add my opinions to the same. The cover aspect Kavita features right now is sort of perfect when it comes to eastern literature in a way. While webtoons on 1st glance look obviously bad due to those extreme long strips, that is a lost cause - whats important is official covers/season covers for these webtoons, they fit snugly in 2:3/68:100/7:10 which is very close to what Kavita features Manhuas are same. (I have amassed roughly 1700 Volume/Manhwa Season covers officially to test)
So Kavita handles all the official covers of Manga (Full volume sleeves arent meant to be covers persay), Manhwa and Manhua rather well. As per my limited knowledge Comics usually share the 2:3 aspect ratio for majority of the contents too.
So ultimately what could be the solution is - Inbuilt cropper for Kavita if possible, it would allow you to crop the cover out of Manhwa or crop the front of Manga Volume sleeve. (And this could serve as base for eventual set any picture inside cbz as cover - much like Tachiyomi features)
What I would actually like to be seen is, giving users an option to preserve the real quality of covers they upload/cbz dimensions instead of heavy forcefuly resize to 220x320. As on bigger screens it just looks extremely bad. (Option instead default so those who just want speed more instead quality on covers can keep it).
Komga one is inded worse of due to seeing backgrounds and whitespace when it forcefully resizes to fit in window.
In terms of design, what we see in Komga and Amazon are no go for me. In my view, they do not look good and is not something I would want Kavita to have. I am 100% open to discussion and making a change as long as it will work on the majority of user material (books, webtoons, manga, and comics).
Agreed. I think other options look better than those.
My personal preference would be to avoid stretching of the existing cover text / art
I think my top 2 choices would be:
(1) the original aspect ratio (similar to google play books
)
(2) cropping (similar to google search results
)
There could also be opportunity to make this configurable (a global config)
Since there may be different use cases, perhaps a discord poll could be created to see if there is consensus / preference from a wider audience in discord.
I know this discussion hasn't had input for a few weeks, but I wanted to chime in as primarily a western comic reader. I am also in favor of moving to keeping original aspect ratio intact.
@kruegp's Option (1) sums it up best, although I'll add that I don't personally feel that lack of uniformity is an issue. It could very well be artist/publisher intent to release something outside of the "standard" ratio for whatever creative reason and would be great to respect that as much as possible.
There's a few instances in Kavita's current UI where a fixed ratio creates a very undesirable result.
Reading lists highlight this best:
Hi everyone, I would love to see a inbuilt cropper similar to Calibre for my Manga covers.
So I took a look with the latest code from v0.7.10 and here is what I found:
Garfield (Square cover)
Dune (non-standard, tall image)
Froggy (square cover)
Horizontal (longer in the width than height)
Overall, I don't really see much of a problem here. The issue is only present when there is a horizontal image which can get skewed, but the other image types have minimal skewing.
I think as @majora2007 already said, it looks ok. I would still like to chime in with some ideas. Also, I would like to preface this by saying: I do not know if this is handled client or server side, if client side my examples are a little useless, but oh well.
For square (-ish) covers how about doing something like this
This was generated by some python code from a project of mine:
def process_cd_cover(path: str):
cover = Image.open(path)
cover = crop_image(cover, 270, 270) # Edit: There is not really a need to crop here if it was already determined that the cover somewhat resembles a square, should probably rather be squashed/stretched
background = Image.open(path)
background = crop_image(background, 270, 400)
background = background.filter(ImageFilter.GaussianBlur(8))
background.paste(
cover, (0, int((background.height - cover.height) / 2))
)
background.save(path, "JPEG")
Example using https://trekhleb.dev/js-image-carver/:
Garfield before (I am only using a screenshot so the quality is kind of shit, maybe with better quality this looks even better):
After Seam Carving, this does look a little weird, but the text is way more readable then the squashed example from above.
Another example:
Before:
After:
Not sure skewing images is something that is universally seen as acceptable in an app that otherwise prides itself with polish for its UI.
If the cover art is a given ratio that's just how it is. Comics and manga are often released in different aspect ratios and depending on what art is used the skewing can be less or very noticeable, especially with geometric forms.
I understand that nobody would insist on keeping a 299x102px image exactly like that, I think skewing (never cropping) that could be fine to fit into 300x100, but if we're talking different source aspect ratios rather than a suboptimally created file that's just a little off then skewing looks like a hack.
Just my two cents as non-developer though, so I voice this with upmost humbleness.
Edit: checked the linked PR. I agree that some cover art turns out better whilst other art won't. I thought of adjusting the grid layout for different aspect ratios, but I also realize that ai can't contribute code so back to my humbleness. :P
Description
This Github issue is to track further discussions related to the Maintain Cover Aspect Ratio Feature Request.
Considerations / Uses
1:1.4
to1:1.8
)Patterns Other Apps Use
Displaying thumbnails for assets
Combined image collection covers