Editing help..

Guest

I've never edited for a scanlation before, and I certainly can't read Japanese, so I'm not exactly sure what it entails. But I have extensive (hobby) Photoshop experience, and would love to help edit some manga for Manga Screener (I'd love to help out with Nana, specificallly, but I'd help with whatever).

I assume it would involve deleting the Japanese text and typing in the English translations.. maybe cleaning up the scan a bit. I'm sure I'd be perfectly capable. So if ya need some help with anything, and would like to give me a try, I'm over at recklesslo@yahoo.com .

I'm also experienced in web design and misc graphic design, if you need anything like that as well. (Although the site looks very nice and well-made)

Very Happy

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2004 3:53 pm

If you want further details on editing, you can check out some editing guides that can show you some of the things you would have to do as an editor. Mind you, not all scans will require all of the things that these guides show you. Some might, some might not.

Donthurt's Guide: http://donthurt.cjb.net/
The Hawk's Quick Guide: http://www.thehawks.org/hawks/guide/
Ookla's Guide: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~panjieyi/
Censored Vagina's Guide: http://www.raspberryheaven.net/~cv/manga_guide/index.htm

All of these links and several editing tests can be found at: http://www.manganews.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=603.

Hope that helps.

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2004 4:41 pm

Ah, thanks. Seems all well in my capability. I'll take a test and post later. Smile

Fan Boy Joined: 19 Nov 2003 Posts: 40

I may not be the original poster, but thanks for the links. I was kinda wondering how long it would take and how difficult\tedious it would be for me to do a decent job if I decided for some reason to take up editing. Now I get to take a little practice test Smile

I know my way around photoshop ok, and looking at a few tuts, It doesn't seem like anything I couldn't do, it's just a matter of if I could do it quickly enough to be useful. Razz

I'll just see what happens.

Guest

Alright.. here's the "easy" one:

Before: http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Easy.jpg

After: http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Easy.png

and the "hard" one:

Before: [url]http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Hard Scan 1 before.png[/url]

After: [url]http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Hard Scan 1.png[/url]

Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 11:00 am

recklesslo,

The edit of the easy scan is pretty good, actually. But the scan could have been leveled a bit more. It could've been a bit more bright, but otherwise, it's actually pretty good.

I'm sort of writing from the school computer so I can't exactly see what the hard scan looks like. I'll see it when I get home.

big idjit Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 280

recklesslo wrote:

Alright.. here's the "easy" one:

Before: http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Easy.jpg

After: http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Easy.png

and the "hard" one:

Before: [url]http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Hard Scan 1 before.png[/url]

After: [url]http://www.svufiction.com/manga/Hard Scan 1.png[/url]

A few things

Easy one: you want the white areas to be white, not gray. And the black areas to be black, not gray. otherwise it looks good.

Hard one:
actually this one isn't hard at all. the hard ones are the ones where you have sfx covering the image and you have to "recreate" the image behind it. But
1) needs to be leveled more (white areas need to be white, darks, darker)
2) behind the "Yuji?" and the "inside the cellphone lurked a horrid, horrid beast" you didn't do a good job. it looks like there's a shapless gray blob behind the text.
here is one i did in a few minutes. it's kinda blah since the lines aren't clear, but the contrast of white/black is decent.

Guest

Ok, thanks. I hate to make excuses, but I got a crappy LCD screen and the contrast can only be insanely high to.. well, didn't see those blobs until I highlighted the picture.

The contrast thing.. I see what you mean. I'll do another one a little less hastily, post later. Thanks for the tips.

Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 4:22 pm

mmkay, here's another one from the same test:

Before

After

Guest

..erm, forgot to put my screenname. That was me. By the by, my name's Joan. Howdy and well met. Rolling Eyes

Fan Boy Joined: 19 Nov 2003 Posts: 40

heh. I might as well put my head on the chopping block as well Smile

I have to say that after doing this I have a bit more appreciation for editors, well the good ones anyway. It's not exactly a difficult thing to do, but it does take some skill to do it well and quickly. I haven't done the 2 page spread image that came in the test yet. I'm still trying to get the hang of cleaning the gutter up well.

I resorted to tripod cause I don't have a good place to host images right now. So please forgive the crap.
http://mrgumby256.tripod.com/Untitled-1.htm

Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2004 11:48 pm

I know I'm not an editor, but it's still good to have knowledge of how it works to be able to critique others.
Allow me to go over one trick that I use to fine-tune levels to make sure they are optimal.
I came to this procedure on my own but I was surprised to hear that most editors I've mentioned it to had never thought of something like it.
At any rate, it's good for determining when your blacks are solidly black and your whites are nice and white (no page texture).

Let's use this panel of Stopper Busujima I got off Winny (a Japanese p2p prog).

1) I'm sure most editors have more sophisticated methods of controlling levels than just using the "Levels" dialog, but for simplicity's sake I'll do just that.
So let's bring it up and pop in some half-assed values.

2) Now, to check how pure your b&w's are, do a test with Levels. Skew them way black by setting your lower value to 253.

Notice all the junk in the white spaces, mostly from jpg artifacting in this case.
Even if you can't see them on the regular picture, those dirty bits are going to mess with your png filesize, so close the Levels dialog (don't save, of course!)
use your method of choice to clean it up more, and try the test again.

This one is a marked improvement. You can still see some blotches in this example,
but as long as you're working from non-compressed PSDs that won't be a problem, of course.

3) Now do the same for the other end of the spectrum. Test the Levels by setting the higher value to 2.

The parts that should be solid black like the umpire's leg and mask and the catcher's sleeve are speckled with lots of non-black spots.
So cancel the Levels and do what you need to do to darken the picture. Hopefully after some work it should look more like this...

Now the solid black areas ARE solid black, and you can see faint signs of the text as well.

4) So here is the nice png version of what I did with just Levels and the changes above. Most editors I expect have some more advanced form of cleaning scans, so I'd expect even better results from most.

Final note: The is the very Quick and Dirty method of determining how pure your whites and blacks are. I'm sure there are other more sophisticated ways of going about it, but for someone who isn't immediately intuitive with PS, it's just an effective way of gauging where your exact levels lie.