Senbonzakura Kageyoshi

This tutorial may be specific to how M7 does grays, but the principles can probably be applied elsewhere. It covers:

• Flat grays
• Gradient grays
• Patterned grays

We’ll start where the Redrawing Tutorial leaves off. You’ve covered the gray area with a new layer of gray. You’ve redrawn the line art on top.

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Select the gray layer and apply the Film Grain Filter with settings 8/0/0. Filter > Artistic > Film Grain. The first slider is set to 8, the second and third are set to 0. For M7, make sure you’re working on the original 3000 px raw so that it resizes properly when you’re done.

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Sometimes, we have gradient backgrounds that go from dark gray to light gray.

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For this, use the Eyedropper Tool to take a 5 x 5 sample of both ends of the gradient (one for the foreground swatch, one for the background swatch).

Next, select the Gradient Tool, which is in the same square as the Paint Bucket. The default gradient is Foreground to Background.

First, put a layer of gray over the gradient. You can either use the Lasso Tool like in the Redrawing Tutorial or you can use the Pen Tool if you prefer.

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Now lock the transparency on that layer so you can only affect pixels that have already been designated a color.

With the Gradient Tool Selected, and the appropriate shades of gray as foreground and background, draw a line in the direction of your gradient.

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Now apply the Film Grain filter like before. You’ll have to tweak the second two sliders a little bit to make sure the gradient isn’t fuzzed out. For this panel, I used the settings 8/2/2.

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Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of gray patterns, too. In general, they have a swirly or mottled appearance.

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Using whichever method you prefer, copy the mottled gray background onto it’s own layer. Lock the transparency on that layer.
Go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Move the slider until the original print texture is no longer visible. The reason the layer is locked is so that you don’t blur onto other parts of the page.

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Now add the Film Grain. Like with the gradient, you might want to tweak the last two sliders to prevent the filter from fuzzing out the contrast. Again, I used 8/2/2 for this.

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I’ve come across a few instances where the differences between the grays was very small. This can be troublesome because when you apply the film grain, you lose even more of the contrast. If this happens, make a duplicate copy of your blurred gray layer and place it above the layer that gets the film grain. Now set the duplicate to multiply and reduce the opacity until you get the shades of gray you want. But since you have the extra layer, your film grain is most likely faded now, right? In this case, set your film grain extra strong to compensate for the second layer. For one panel, I had the Film Grain set to 12/2/2 and the top multiplied layer was at 80% opacity.

In some cases, you’ll have a mottled gray background with white spots. You have to be careful because if you film grain white, it’s no longer white. For this, either 1) don’t include the white areas in the gray blur layer or 2) use the magic wand to copy and paste the white areas onto a layer above the gray blur layer.

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This is pretty much a conceptual tutorial. I’m not including screenshots because the ideas have already been covered in the Beginner Borders and Advance Borders (Lasso) tutorials. Also check out the Lasso Guide if you’re unfamiliar with that tool.

First set your guides like in the Beginner Borders tutorial.

Then use the Polygonal Lasso to create a selection around your panels. You can do one panel at a time or you can do them all at once, it’s up to you. Since the Lasso will snap to the guides, this part should go really quickly.

Stroke the selection and choose Inside. Outside and center will give you crappy corners, so make sure you choose inside.

Also, make sure you don’t draw a border around panels that go right up to the edge of the page. This is covered in the Beginner tutorial if you don’t understand what I mean. When using the Polygon Lasso, you can actually click in the ruler or the scroll bar to place a point off the page.

I honestly think that this method is better than the Beginner method, but I also think it’s slightly more complicated. That’s why I’m saving it for after you can do perfect borders. Better to start off simple and start off right, ne?

This technique was passed on to me from the ever-talented shade. He had an awesome .avi tutorial (with awesome background music), but I can’t find it anywhere. So this mundane tutorial will have to suffice for now.

By ‘motion lines,’ I mean the lines on an object indicating speed and movement.

I imagine you could do this with a mouse if you were really, really talented, but I highly suggest only using this method if you have a graphic tablet. Sorry ^^;

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1) Make a new layer. You should be used to this by now ^^

2) Cover the motion lines with white. Usually, I’ll use the Pen Tool to draw a path around the area, fill with white, and then stroke with black on a higher layer. That way it’ll be sure to have a nice border.

Since her arm kind of had two distinct section, I made a layer for each part.

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3) Lock the transparency on the layer so that you can only make changes to the areas that have already been inked (the white area).

4) Set the Brush Tool to 1 px for every 1000 px that your raw is high. So for the 3000 px high raws, I set the pencil to 3 px. On a 1200 px raw, I’d use a 1 px Brush.

Now comes the fun part. Lower the opacity of the white layer so you can see the direction of the motion lines underneath. Set the brush to black and scribble lightly across that area. Since the layer is locked, you will only color on the pixels that have already been colored white.

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5) Set the opacity back to 100% after a few scribbles and continue coloring it in until you get to the darkness you want. If you make it too dark, you can switch to white, add a few white streaks, and then scribble over those in black again.

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Since the raw had a lot of white near the bottom of her arm, I added a few white lines with the Pen Tool after I was done scribbling the motion lines. I tapered the strokes so that they faded nicely into the motion lines (see this tutorial for an explanation).

Then I prepared the second part of her arm by making a new layer and covering that part in white.

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I did the second section exactly like the first and added extra white streaks near the bottom. This is the final product.

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Here are some other examples:

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I realized that I’ve been flinging terms like HQ and MQ around pretty casually, so I wanted to clarify what I mean by them: High Quality, Medium Quality, and Low Quality.

Now I’m not here to argue what’s better, so I will try to present this in a unbiased manner.

There are two main types of raws: magazine scans and tankoubon. Magazines are usually lower quality due to cheap paper and ink. Tankoubons are bound volumes (books) usually consisting of several chapters. These are high quality.

Also, take into consideration the scanning resolution of the raw. Some pages are scanned at normal size and resolution (~800 px x 1200 px at 72 dpi [dots per inch]) while others are ~2500 px x 3000 px at 300 dpi. Obviously, the latter is higher resolution and will usually produce a better clean. The very bottom of this totem pole are photos taken of the raw using a digital camera.

It seems everyone has different opinions of what HQ should consist of, so instead I’ll list the points you should look for in a scanlation and you can decide how to rank things yourself.

These are listed in order of base criteria. Lower quality will only meet the first couple points while higher quality will meet them all.

• Pages are white (not yellow, pink, or gray)
• Edges of the page are not visible (no black lines around edges of page)
• Japanese text is fully removed (not just written over in English)
• Page is properly leveled (not overleveled)
• Black areas are fully black
• White areas are fully white
• Borders are redrawn
• Line art is clear and unbroken (not blurry)
• Gray areas are uniformly solid or patterned (not blurry or distorted)
• Text outside of bubbles has been removed and the picture redrawn
• White line art and details are redrawn if needed

Of course there are many degrees of meeting these criteria. Black areas can be mostly black or gray areas can be fixed up but not redrawn.

A new phenomenon in the scanlating world is the use of denoise programs like Neat Image and Topaz Vivacity. These will get the job done quicky but the quality varies greatly between groups and individuals. There are some very skilled denoisers out there (and they’re getting better every week). There are also many many people who don’t know what they’re doing and put out very LQ work. Speed scanners almost always use a denoise program or plug-in and produce admittedly LQ or LQ/MQ cleans (though a few groups have been putting out solid MQ.) The benefit is that a chapter can be speed scanned in hours by only a handful of people as opposed to HQ groups which require several dedicated cleaners and up to a week.

Anyway, I thought it might be good to give examples of different groups and different styles. Here is the same page done by as many groups as I could find, but I’ll keep the pages anonymous so you can browse without any bias. Again, this is not to say what is better or worse since every style has its strengths and weaknesses. This is merely to demonstrate the wide variety of techniques out there.

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I hope this helps to clarify how scanlations are rated. As a member of an HQ Bleach group, it really really really kills me to see a LQ/MQ scan called High Quality (usually by the readers, not by the scanlators).

First, I want to say that I’m not terribly familiar with the Burn Tool. Most HQ groups only use the Burn Tool sparingly, but I understand its necessity for speed scanning. So here are my two cents on using the Burn Tool to fill in blacks and whites.

I was messing around with a Jump SQ raw (2000 px height) and precleaned it first with the Diffuse Filter and then the High Pass Sharpening Filter. I don’t use actions, but you could probably set something up.

1) After you have your preclean, make a duplicate of that layer and label it Burn, and then do all your burning on that. That way, if you make a mistake and want to go back to the original preclean, you still have a copy.

2) On the Burn layer, use the Magic Wand to select the black areas. Set it with a kind of high tolerance ~50. Chances are it will include the line art and extend to parts of the page you don’t necessarily want to work on quite yet.

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Notice that the Magic Wand selected the face and neck as well as the bubble outline. If you burn these lines, they will appear overleveled. In fact, even if you burned the jacket right now, the edges would become jagged and overleveled.

THE EDGES OF THE HAIR AND SHIRT ARE OVER-LEVELED:

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3) To keep the edges nice and anti-aliased, after making your selection with the Magic Wand, go to the Select Menu > Modify > Contract. Contract by 2 pixels and click OK. Note below that the line art has been deselected along with the bubble outline.

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4) Now, when you Burn, you won’t be burning the pixels at the very edge of the black areas. On the toolbar at the top, set the Range to Shadows so that you only Burn the dark pixels and not the lighter gray ones.

With the black areas still selected, use the Burn Tool to do your inking. By keeping the selection active, you will only affect pixels inside the selection. This lets you be kind of sloppy without messing up other parts of the page. Also, this prevents you from burning the grays, which are not part of the selection.

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At this point, some of you may be saying ‘I don’t see much difference, why should I bother with contracting the selection?’ But you have to trust me on this. There IS a difference, and it could probably be translated as the difference between a LQ scan and a MQ scan.

5) Some of the lighter specks in the black areas weren’t selected with the Magic Wand and so they weren’t included when you used the Burn Tool. After Deselecting, these can easily be covered over with the Pencil Tool and shouldn’t take too long to fix.

This panel took me a minute to ink, and after I cleaned the specks in the white, too, I think it’d pass for MQ.

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6) If you want to spend an extra minute on this area and make it look even nicer, you can touch up the white areas. So if part of the white hair highlights got burned over, you can delete that area of the Burn Layer to reveal the original Preclean.

Like I keep saying, this is not my area of expertise, but I wanted to throw the tutorial out there for all the new people doing speed scans. This method will prevent you from overleveling the edges of your blacks.

*** One last tip for the Burn Tool: DO NOT BURN GRAYS. That’s why I suggest using the Magic Wand to select certain areas. If a dark gray gets selected along with the black, just be careful not to burn it.

Also, if there is a dark gray right next to your selection, sometimes the burn leaks out of the dotted area. It’s kind of annoying, but keep an eye out for it so you don’t ruin your grays.

This filter sharpens the image, which can make things appear over-leveled if you’re not careful. I don’t recommend this technique for anyone who does not have a good grasp of what over-leveling looks like. It is easy to abuse and thus screw up.

Aside from overall quality, I was messing around with some Jump SQ raws and discovered that the High Pass filter is really good for darkening line art that has gray tone under it. So it’s great for MQ cleans where you don’t want to spend much time on the gray areas. Also, this does not destroy gray tones the way a denoise program can.

Additionally, it works fine regardless of your raw page size.

This method was passed on to me from abu_89, who says “Warning. Excessive usage of this technique is like drinking alcohol. You know what happens– it might seem cool at the time, but in the end, it just means more work for you.”

Use sparingly!!

For the Jump SQ pages I was playing with, I first precleaned using the diffuse filter.

1. Duplicate the leveled layer twice.
2. On the top duplicate, use the High Pass Sharpening Filter. Go Filter > Other > High Pass. Choose 15 px radius.
3. Set that layer to Soft Light mode.
4. Add a Gaussian Blur. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Choose 1-4 px (I liked 2.5 px).
5. Merge down to combine the two duplicated layers.
6. Now you should have your original raw layer, a leveled/diffused layer, and a high pass layer. I like to keep all three so that if I ever want to go back and change something, I won’t have to start from scratch.

Like abu said, this method can be abused by repeating it over and over again, but after once or twice, the quality really takes a dive, so please DON’T USE THIS MORE THAN ONCE PER PAGE.

If you are forced to use a small raw (1200 px height or so), then tweak the settings accordingly : something like High Pass 10 px radius and Gaussian Blur 2 px. These numbers aren’t set in stone, but again, keep an eye on your page and make sure you don’t over-do it ^^

This is how M7 recommends precleaning a Bleach raw (usually one of Kylara’s high-res raws). I tried it on a smaller raw (2000 px height) and it came out fine, so this might be a good alternative to Neat Image if you don’t have access to a super-HQ raw.

Thanks to Yumi for the original tutorial.

1. Make a copy of the raw background – right click on the Background Layer and choose to duplicate it. Do your leveling on this copy so that you can always go back and try again.

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2. Make sure the Mode is set to Grayscale. Go to the Image menu at the top, go to Mode, choose Grayscale.

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3. From the same Image menu, go Image -> Adjustments -> Replace Color. Set Fuzziness to 80, Lightness to 100 and click the dot-button for Image. Your cursor will now appear as a dropper tool so just click anywhere on the page where it should be white, but isn’t. Click OK. The page should appear very washed out now.

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4. Now we level. See the Intro to Leveling tutorial for an explanation of the Level window. Move the white slider to the left of the white peak, but don’t move the black slider yet.

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For this method, you can over-level the whites a bit as long as you don’t touch the blacks (so you can move the white slide further to the left than the Intro tells you to). Don’t try to get rid of the darkest specks, though, or you’ll sacrifice the rest of the page for a handful of specks. Those you can remove later.

5. Duplicate this leveled layer. Set the copy to 50% opacity and set mode to Multiply (on the Layers window, where it usually says “Normal,” open the drop down menu and choose “Multiply.”)

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6. Go under Filters -> Stylize -> Diffuse. Choose anisotropic and click ok.

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7. Level your blacks now on both the leveled layer and the diffused layer. You can darken the blacks quite a bit now and they’ll look good. (NOTE: Diffuse makes straight lines often look quite squiggly… So be careful with it.) The reason we can get away with over-leveling the whites in step 4 is because we diffuse the blacks to reduce jagged edges. The white slider on the diffuse layer might also need to be tweaked a tiny bit.

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8. Voila! Your page is precleaned!

Don’t be afraid to go through this process a couple times and tweak things differently. Sometimes I’ll have a couple layers with different levels, and then I toggle them on and off to decide which I like best.

After this, you may want to try using the High Pass Sharpening Filter to make your lines a little darker.

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This is another great tutorial by anifanatical.

Adjustment Layers can help with two main things when cleaning:

1. Original leveling.
2. Cleaning blacks and whites.

This is because when you use adjustment layers to do leveling, you can change the levels as you work!

The button for adjustment layers is on the bottom of your layers window.

Using adjustment layers for leveling
Click it and go to “levels.”
A normal levels window will appear but instead of just applying the levels to your image, it will create a layer.
In the image, I have the levels layer selected.

Because your levels are on a layer, you can show/hide it like other layers. And now, if you double-click on the layer, you can adjust the levels whenever you need to! It’s extremely convinent to do all leveling in this manner because if you don’t level the page perfectly the first time, you can always go back and edit it.

Using adjustment layers for Blacks/Whites
By using the adjustment layers you can easily max out levels to spot dirt on your page without ruining your original levels.
For example, if you use an adjustment layer to max out blacks, dirt in your whites will show up significantly better.

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And vice-versa for finding white dirt in blacks.

Thanks, ani!!

There are three types of Lassos: Regular, Polygonal, and Magnetic. Personally, I use the Polygonal Lasso the most.

• Lasso lets you select something completely manually. It’s good if you want to copy/paste a single object – just use the Lasso to draw a circle around it.
• Polygonal Lasso uses a series of points to make a polygon around the area you want to select. This is good for when you want to be more precise since you can carefully choose your next point. IF YOU MAKE A MISTAKE AND CLICK WHERE YOU DIDN’T WANT TO, HIT THE BACKSPACE KEY TO UNDO.
• Magnetic Lasso automatically identifies the object or line that you’re trying to select and will “stick” the Lasso path to that object or line. You can undo a point using the Backspace Key here, too. Between us, I can NEVER get it to perfectly select what I want, and I always have to go back and fix things anyway.

To close your Lasso selection, bring the path back to where you started. The thin gray line now becomes “marching ants” to indicate you’ve made a selection. Now, you can right click to bring up the menu.

For the purposes of this Beginner guide, only focus on “Stroke” and “Fill” for now.

• Stroke creates a line along the selection path. You can decide how wide you want the line to be, and whether you want it to be inside the path, outside the path, or centered directly on the path.
• Fill does just that – it fills the selection with the Foreground Color.

Once you’re done with your selection, hit CTRL-D (Command-D) to Deselect and make the marching ants go away.

As with many Photoshop Tools, holding down the Shift Key will let you make a perfectly horizontal or vertical selection line.

If you want to select everything outside your selection (as opposed to what is enclosed within your selection), hit CTRL-SHIFT-I (Command-SHIFT-I) to switch to the Inverse. Now everything outside the marchings ants is selected, even though the marching ants haven’t changed.

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*** One thing to keep in mind is that the Lasso Tool has an anti-aliased checkbox. This will affect Stroking or Filling the section. Also, you have to choose anti-aliasing or not before you make your selection. Once you’ve created your selection, toggling the checkbox won’t make a difference.

I find it easiest to always keep the box checked and uncheck it for the few times I don’t want anti-aliasing. Please see the anti-aliasing guide if you need more information.

For lack of a better term, I’ll call this category “filling,” since it will cover ways to fill in large areas with a single color. Some groups may call it “inking.”

To start, I’ll focus on filling in BLACKS and WHITES.

For this, there are only two rules: Black areas must be filled in completely with black and white areas must be completely with white. Piece of cake, right?

So why do these two rules often get overlooked? I really have no idea. Either there is a speck in the white or there is not. If you zoom into your page and do a really thorough speck check, you won’t have any problems.

There are several different ways to fill in black areas, and this tutorial will use the Polygonal Lasso Tool, though the Pen Tool will work much the same.

BLACKS:

1) Zoom in on the area you want to fill. With the Polygonal Lasso Tool selected, make a series of points along the very edge of the area.

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*** If you make a mistake and click somewhere by accident, hit the BACKSPACE key to undo the last point.
2) When you get back to the beginning of your Lasso path, click on the first point to close the loop. The thin solid line should now become “marching ants,” indicating you’ve selected the area inside your polygon.

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3) Right click and select “Fill” from the menu. Leave the defaults, and just make sure you’re choosing black as your foreground or background color. Click OK, and the area inside your polygon will turn black.

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4) Hit CTRL-D (or Command-D for macs) to Deselect and make the marching ants go away. Now do this for the rest of the black areas ^_^

5) For thin areas or oddly-shaped areas, it’s sometimes easier to just use the Brush Tool to ink something by hand. If I’m being particularly picky, I’ll use the Pen Tool, and then Stroke and Fill the pen path to make it perfect.

The bottom line is that whichever method you choose, the entire area must be solid black.

WHITES:

In general, the black areas will always have to be completely inked over. This is due to the aforementioned crappy magazine printing. If you did a good job leveling, however, white areas will be clean except for a few left over specks of gray “dust”. You don’t have to be as careful covering over these specks as you do when inking blacks.

Again, use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to enclose the area that needs to be cleaned up. This time, you don’t have to be so careful getting close to the border. You just have to make sure all the big specks are included.

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Then just right click and choose “Fill.”

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Again, it doesn’t matter which method you ultimately use for removing specks from white areas, they just have to be removed. Sometimes it’s faster to just use the Brush Tool to manually remove any specks.

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If you’re cleaning for an HQ group, you’ll probably have to cover over gray areas with a new layer of gray. The Polygonal Lasso Tool is good for filling in those areas as well, though to make it look really nice I use the Pen Tool, Fill with gray, and then Stroke the pen path with black to keep the line art nice and smooth.