Hey, after getting bored I decided I would try and teach myself how to clean manga. This clearly proves I'm an idiot. 5 hours AFTER getting photoshop and learning to use it (it only took 4.5 hours to do that) I had manged to clean a massive 1 panel of 1 page at a quality compariable to "high quality" scans (although still not completely up to par) (high quality scans are seen in major series like Naruto, Bleach and One Piece). This made me wonder just how important the image quality was to other people. Personally, before I started this once the cleaning in a manga got to a certain level I had diffuculty telling the difference between what was "quality" and what was just the artists style (and as it turns out it took a very low level of cleaning to make me happy). When making coments here please remember I'm not talking about translation, I'm sure we ALL hate bad translation

Oh and as a side note, I'm never gonna look at manga the same, my god I thoughout the scan teams deserved out thanks b4, I can say in confidence people probably dont realize to what extent this is true till they try doing some of the stuff they do.

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Double dino to micro crimp!!!

High Quality usually means that they get high quality scans of the manga itself, they don't actually clean it themselves to make it look "high quality" They do clean here and there on lower quality scans and they only take like 1/2 hour tops to clean, if even that much cuz they just use a basic filter and run it over the scan. Some people do real subtle jobs that wouldn't make that much of a difference while others do overkill and just make the thing look smeared (you can tell when people overkill).

If people are there to collect the series, they should buy it or just wait for a group to release the actual released volume of the series so they can get HQ scans themselves or what not. However most people jsut want to read the newest chapter asap and then delete it off their PC or keep it for the sake of reading again in the future so they don't give care about a good cleaning job.

Last edited by Jayof9s at 8:45 pm, Jun 2 2012

I think to really be able to enjoy the art of a manga you need to have a certain degree of quality. There sure are a lot of impatient people but personally even if I read a speedscanlation, I never collect those. I wait on a HQ for burning (not to mention that groups who have the time to clean properly, tend to spend more time on translation/proofing aswell).

Btw starting of with magazine scans is a pain, why don't you try to do tankoubo (sp?) scans first? It's way easier and you don't need that much patience....

Can't say I like it, but after one has been in a group on that field,
one can't stop looking for errors in other's works.
Whenever I read, I try to figure out what the font.
As for random leechers, I don't think they really care for
the looks that much as long as it is not super LQ with
a horrible font.

As a side note I WILL take a hell of a lot longer on cleaning then someone with more experience, but even still I saw commens from the people writing the extensive and detailed tutorials about sometimes taking 3 hours for one panel (mind you I'd say this is probably not the norm)

Last edited by Nins_Leprechaun at 4:22 pm, Jan 29 2008

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Double dino to micro crimp!!!

It is important. No need to explain why.

I recommend you use a graphic tablet with photoshop, it really makes the job easier.

And maybe go for Gimp? Somehow I doubt all ppl are using legal photoshops...

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Still the bad cop.

Um... this may be outdated, since I've been gone for about a year (and a WHOLE lot has changed), but High Quality Scans were (are?) 600 dpi scans. Anything that was (is?) taken from a japanese P2P program (Winny, Share, Perfect Dark) is 'low quality', which basically means you did what you could, but you started with something inferior, so oh well. Low Quality is also used to rate magazine scans, as they're published on the same paper as phone books, and thus have incredibly terrible tendencies to get saturated with ink in place and be blank in others (I'm sure you've read some series like this... Naruto has been using them longer than most). I know that some groups attempt to turn those scans into 'HQ' work, but it's always just an attempt. If you look at a scan from the actual volume and a magazine scan side by side, there's a level of detail that is impossible to achieve using the printing methods that magazines use (the things cost lunch money in Japan for 300 to 400 pages of manga and they come out weekly, so it's expected quality). So, there's HQ, P2P, and Magazine, and people can try to make them look like they're something else, but anyone looking even remotely closely can see the differences.

As for cleaning an actual HQ scan, it's very easy. Very fast. Assuming the scanner didn't have any gunk on the glass or dirt or anything, the page will look brilliant with a little leveling and some cropping. If you're interested in seeing what I mean, I have an editor test linked on my group's site with HQ raws (in the most recent update text). The editor test is over, but the zip file is still there for download.

Whistful side note: It used to be that everyone did 'HQ' scans, so there was no 'HQ' just 'scans'. Now everyone and their mother jumps on Share and grabs whatever the hell comes up first and makes it English... I know it makes for faster work (only for people who don't know what they're doing, but that's most), and more groups (which isn't necessarily a good thing), but I think it took a huge chunk out of the legitimacy that we strove for back in the infancy of scanslation. You know, back when we actually bought the stuff we did. Instead of stealing it to give it to others. It's a tiny, tiny change, but it means the world to old windbags like me.

It's amazing what some editors (cleaners) can do with photoshop, a jump raw, and a whole of dedication and time. I like my manga nice and clean, the greys looking grey, the black black, and the white white. It really does bother me a little when I read manga that's over or under leveled since that's usually what happens, either that or not leveled at all. However, no matter how much it bothers me, I don't have any right to complain since I tried a brief stint as an editor and I couldn't juggle all the work given to me.

Back to the topic at hand...I care how good of a cleaning job is done depending on what the scans are labeled, LQ, MQ, or HQ. As Snoopy has pointed out, the raws probably make the biggest difference, so depending on what the scanlators are working with, my expectations will change. But in the end, I'm just glad I got to read my manga, but I'll definitely be changing out the scanlations I first got if something of a higher quality came out later.

I'm OCD, when i picked up cleaning and editing, I had to make sure everything was just right.... too bad i dropped it shortly after, wayy too time consuming for me. Maybe over the summer I'll do some scans, but that's about it.

I am editor. I do the cleaning, editing and typesetting. The cleaning is the easiest/fastest part. Editing takes much more time, like a sfx across a whole town... But buildings are not as difficult as people and especially hands... Sure, I can use my graphic tablet but I really suck at drawing, which means I have to cover it up.
I think it took me 2 days to understand the basics and 2 more days until I finished my first chapter. But I had to redo it, because my leveling was way to bright. And yeah leveling was the worst part of cleaning, but I think that I can handle it more or less now. I am active since last September but I am still learning. One month ago I saw my first edited chapter and nearly cried, because it look really odd. The editing was fine but the typesetting was weird. And I still have problems with the typesetting and I am still learning. However I am finally able to edit a chapter without asking our headeditor what to do. And yeah I am cleaning every sfx and all details I can find. Which means that I can sit even hours on one page.

In short; I think nearly everybody can be editor, if you are able to keep on learning and like to search for details. Even if you cant handle something at the beginning, trust me, the more experience you gain, the easier it will be. There is no need for low quality releases.

I have tried cleaning and some things can be a real pain. Though it was pretty interesting learning all these techniques and getting them to work.

What I want to learn is how to go from this:

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b21/AuraBlaze/17myhime165 lc.jpg

to this:

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b21/AuraBlaze/041023el.jpg

I'm guessing crop -> resize -> level -> and then going over areas with the magic wand/burn/blur tools. Going to need alot of patience too

I know because i have friends in well known groups that scanlate

A really good cleaning job is great, and I do appreciate it when groups take the time & effort. However...I'm pretty happy with anything from about "medium" on up.

If it speeds up releases then medium-quality is fine - I'm not talking about speed scan groups competing to have the fastest version out, I'm talking about groups that go months & months between single-chapter releases of series that are already complete in Japan.

Please, no flames about how this is all done for free, I should be grateful they do it at all, I have no business complaining about speed, etc. - I know all that. I'm just saying that I wouldn't mind sacrificing a bit of image quality in exchange for faster releases. (If it's a series I really love, I buy the Japanese tankoubon anyway, and the English version if one is available....)

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992