Hi there! I finally managed to convince a good friend to be my translator (native Korean, excellent translator!). As it is now he'll do the translations, while i'll be in charge of everything else. But we just run into a few obstacles. Maybe someone out there could point me into the right direction.

I'm already very familiar with photoshop. But i have no real experience cleaning manhwa. Right now i'm trying to be much more efficient. Looking for hints, tips, is there some kind of tutorial?

Also we would like to put our scans on our own online manga reader. Are there any good online manga reader scripts available?

ahh nice. congrats on forming a new group, hope you guys enjoy it and last hehe.

uhh i dont really know any tutorials off the top of my head since i dont really know of a "complete" tutorial, theyre always lacking something imo. although i do have a few tips that will hopefully help::

you should already know the basics to cleaning manga. the order i do it is [level>check alignment>crop>resize>clean bubbles>redraw] make sure you resize before cleaning or redrawing...just makes things easier since its obviously a smaller page to work with haha. as for checking if its straight...it depends on who or where you get your raws from. if the first chapter of the volume is straight then the rest should be fine unless you can tell that the page is obviously crooked. fastest way without any headache to check if the page is straight for me is to select Crop and start the selection on one side, then drag and align the other side of the selection box to the side of either the top or bottom panels. if it needs to be realigned use the ruler tool and rotate arbitrarily.

also, the best thing you can do imo to save time is to save some of the stuff you do as an action. as for me i have 2 actions for 2 different resizes x1200 and x1400. i also have the whole switching to color to apply topaz filters and back to greyscale crap saved as an action. filters are awesome but only on crappy raws so be careful with filters if youre gonna use them or else it'll end up looking like a a wet oil painting haha.

LAYERS! gotta have multiple layers all the time...saves you a lot of time and heartache in case you make a mistake. although for me i only have 2 layers haha. 1st layer raw and 2nd layer i level and clean bubbles. if i need to redraw i duplicate layer and just keep duplicating layers for each redraw and merge each one as i finish.

i know some people that like to put a blank white layer below their work layer they can just use the eraser so you dont have to keep switching between eraser and brush for white. personally i dont see the point since its not that hard to hit E and B to switch between the two lmao. speaking of E and B, obviously you should learn your hotkeys as they will save you a lot of time.

last tip since this is getting long, after you finish everything and wanna do a little QC to make sure all the blacks are actually black and the whites are white, bring up the level window one more time. use the midtone slider and slide all the way to right to make sure theres no dust and such on the whites and slide to the left to make sure theres no white spots on any black areas. Gotta use Burn shadows and Dodge highlights for this process and i set the exposure on both at 10%. also useful to see when theres things like really light clouds that might have disappeared in the original leveling process.

as for online manga readers, quite a few groups have their own now but only mangastream and easy going scans are the ones i can remember right now. should be a good start though, i'd email each group's admin and ask about their readers for more info

k, hope that helps, or actually, i hope you actually read that since its so damn long hahaha.

good luck!!

Online reader scripts.

Two most popular ones currently are "Online Manga Reader" and "Foolz Reader" / "Fool Slide"

OMR (with mod) is what's being used by Easy Going Scans for example and was used previously at The Company as well (also modded). It used to be the most popular and still is used by quite a few. WP version of OMR is called Komiku but I found that rather disappointing (though two are technically unrelated).

FR/FS is the currently new trending one. Made by woxxy and crew at foolrulez. It's more web 2.0-ish.

Or you can employ a manga reader as a service instead of a self-hosted software. Like Batoto for example to host it for you. That removes a lot of headaches like webhosting and costs. For example, if a popular ~ fair sized group making a mass release will have as much as 200mbps spike in bandwidth usage. Can you handle that? It won't come cheap. Or will you have download wait (like many IRC bots do during spikes)/laggy website?

If you are looking for a reader to cater webtoon style, I don't think any self-hosted version will do that out of the box. (Though batoto will).

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The Company
[b]Batoto

Wow, I really like Easy Going Scans reader, how can I implement the Webtoon theme to the original OMV like them? Does anybody have a clue?