First, some background. Shading in manga is typically done using something called screen tones, which are textured patterns that print more easily and cheaply than solid grays. When it is initially published, manga is generally printed at an extremely low quality with numerous imperfections, then it's later compiled into a volume and printed at a higher quality. Many weekly magazines look downright atrocious and it was largely to address this issue that the Photoshop filters used heavily in cleaning nowadays came to gain wider acceptance.
I'm not going to point fingers (not that I'd know where to point my finger to begin with), but at some point, someone decided that ALL manga needed to be put through filter hell. With horrible-looking weeklies, this isn't a big problem. It makes the line work more visible and there are very little in the way of minute details to preserve with such terrible printing quality. But as far as monthly publications and tankoubon releases go? For the most part, cleaners should drop filters altogether and leave the artwork raw. The textured screen tones are part of the art work and don't need to be smoothed out.
Now, there ARE legitimate reasons these filters are used. For example, they can be used to decrease the file size when saved in PNG format and they remove some imperfections. But at the cost of removing such imperfections and saving a little space, even more imperfections are added and what comes out is a blurry smudged mess devoid of the texture and life of the original artwork. Anyone familiar with digital noise reduction in video should have a light bulb turning on over their head right about now, because it's more or less the exact same problem.
And now, the most exciting part of any Internet tirade: the visuals.
Here's a series I worked on a couple years ago before I noticed this cleaning style as a problem. (This series is called Yakuza Girl if you're curious. If you want my honest opinion, I can't really recommend it. )
Anyway, here's the original raw with no filters applied. You can see everything fine, right? Barring issues with the artwork itself, of course. The printing's not great, but eh.
Here's the scanlated version of that page. The blacks are actually black, which is nice! But wait, the dark grays have been lost completely, swallowed up in the black, and the remaining gray screen tones have lost all their texture in favor of a lumpy smudge.
How about a more recent example? Let's look at To Love-ru Darkness. Just as a warning, the following example is NSFW, though I think it should be okay. It's relevant, and I've posted worse with a mod's approval. That said, I apologize, mods, if this isn't accepable for the forums.
Spoiler (mouse over to view)
As you probably know, this is probably the most famous ecchi series running at the moment, in large part thanks to Tokyo's recent regulations regarding what can be depicted in manga and the fact that it runs in what was once Monthly Shounen Jump. This may sound silly, but the fanservice here is highly political and there's an underlying reason it goes to print, so I'm not just complaining about having my jerk material ruined.
Here's a raw page from chapter 8. Again, not the best printing, but you can see perfectly well what's happening.
(NSFW)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/52/darkness0843.jpg/
And the scanlation. Ignoring the jagged lines and the missing hair lines, Riko's nipple has been completely smudged and lost all of its detail! This is an ecchi manga, so if anything, the ecchi parts should be given the most care, right? I guess not.
(NSFW)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/828/cxctoloverudarknes sch08.png/
Here's a raw page from chapter 8. Again, not the best printing, but you can see perfectly well what's happening.
(NSFW)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/52/darkness0843.jpg/
And the scanlation. Ignoring the jagged lines and the missing hair lines, Riko's nipple has been completely smudged and lost all of its detail! This is an ecchi manga, so if anything, the ecchi parts should be given the most care, right? I guess not.
(NSFW)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/828/cxctoloverudarknes sch08.png/
Let me sum things up. This is why this sort of "cleaning" is bad for manga artwork:
1. It destroys the texture of screen tones
2. It erases many of the finer details
3. It creates a standard by which readers expect to see blurred and destroyed artwork
In the case of magazine scans, the original work is printed imperfectly and so scanlators shouldn't expect to be able to produce a perfect product. This obnoxious use of filters does not improve the artwork. It makes it worse.
I'm not against the use of filters like this altogether. It can be used to decrease moire when resizing if used sparingly and as previously stated, some particularly ugly manga actually benefit from it. But such heavy usage should be the exception, not the rule. A line needs to be drawn. Even in some weeklies, it's done way too much. I've seen images of the scanlation History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi where it looked like a female character had a bulge in her crotch... but a look at the raw showed that it was only because of filtered artwork. It's okay if blacks aren't perfectly black. The texture in the shading isn't an imperfection; it's part of the work. Scanlations are fan translations. As fans, we should be the ones most picky about preserving the artwork, not the first to destroy it.
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.
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If you agree with me and see this kind of cleaning used, please tell the scanlators whose work you're reading how you feel. The only way to stop the destruction of artwork is to make the scanlators aware of what they're doing. For the most part, they don't have bad intentions.
If nobody agrees with me... then the standard of destroyed artwork is already in stone and this is a sad time for scanlation indeed.
Last edited by gringe at 1:08 am, Aug 31 2011