Senbonzakura Kageyoshi

One of the most common mistakes new cleaners make is over-leveling a page. I originally made this tutorial for Shannaro, but here I’ve edited it to be a general guide to leveling.

Each scanlation group will have different tips and tricks for precleaning and denoising a page. This tutorial is designed to give you a general understanding of what leveling is and how it works.

IMPORTANT: Before doing anything, I recommend making a duplicate layer of the raw and doing all your level adjustments on the duplicate. That way, the raw will be untouched in case you want to go back and try again.

First, open your raw in Photoshop. In the Layers window, right click on the raw’s layer (probably named “Background”) and choose “Duplicate Layer.”

Here is an example of a raw page:

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Pretty dull and gray, isn’t it? Leveling is a process that makes light grays look white and dark grays look black.

In Photoshop, go to the Image menu > Adjustments > Levels. These are the levels for the raw page:

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This graph shows you the distribution of pixels on your page. If there are a lot of bars on the right side, you have a lot of white. If there are a lot of bars on the left side, you have a lot of black. The middle represents grays.

Make sure the channel is set to GRAY since we are working in grayscale. If it’s not, go back and set the mode to grayscale.

First we’ll deal with the big peak on the right side. These are the pixels that should be white, but instead look gray. Let’s make them white by sliding the little white triangle to the left. Stop near the left base of the peak. As you move the triangle to the left, the pixels that were light gray become closer to white. If you go too far, you will over-level. Notice the number in the third input box decreases from 255 as the slider moves left.

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Now the page should look pretty washed out since we just made the pixels whiter. To fix this, let’s focus on the left side of the graph. Take the little black triangle and slide it to the very beginning of the black peak. This makes the dark gray pixels appear darker.

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Now we need to adjust the gray slider to the right to make the whole page a little darker. Be careful because this is the easiest place to over-level! Zoom into the page and watch the lines as you adjust the sliders. You don’t want them to become too pixelated! You just want to darken them up a little.

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If you over-level, then all your grays pixels are converted to either black or white, and this makes the lines look pixelated. Over-leveled blacks have a jagged look, and you can see ‘steps’ in the line. Gray pixels make lines look smooth (visit here if you don’t know what anti-aliasing is). The trick here is to remove the grays we don’t want, but keep the grays we do want.

Here are examples of what a page should look like and what it shouldn’t look like.

Good: show

Bad: show

If you want, layer these pages in photoshop so you can compare the differences.

Notice that there is still some dirt in the white areas. Sorry, folks, but you’ll have to remove this by hand. Same with the blacks – they will almost ALWAYS have to be inked over by hand. Don’t try to use leveling to get rid of all the dirt!

Also, when in doubt, under-level. It’s easier to fix a page that has been under-leveled than one that has been over-leveled.

Please remember that this is a basic guide to good leveling, and that different scan groups may use more complicated techniques with filters and plug-ins and such. Nevertheless, these are the basic principles of of the Leveling Window.

If you are still unsure of what OVER-LEVELING is, check out the Anti-alias Guide.

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Once you feel you have a good understanding of how the Leveling Window works, try this method for precleaning your raw.