The three musketeers and words from a janitor

 dorky blogpost about cleaning by pip3 at the end

First up we have Atsushi Kaneko... or someone that draws like him👀. 

Wet Moon ch. 21

Next up, we're back in Minoru Furuya's world. Let's see how the S.R.H. service is doing

Saltiness ch. 9

And now Tokyo Kaido, with a nice mention of an author I like

Tokyo Kaido ch. 21

And now onto pip3's little storytime:

As far as I can tell, over the course of Bernd-Scans' existence, a total of two people have made remarks about our aggressive leveling. 

I could live with the one remark (especially since it was made on 4chin’s /a/ of all places) but ever since another person on our blog made the same complaint my ego has been fatally wounded, and I’ve been thinking all week about how I should redeem myself.

This post is me attempting just that.

I reckon I should start by talking the reader through my cleaning process and then discuss  some of the criticisms and downsides to my methods.

We start out with AshneeHS’s 600 dpi scans of the Italian release of TK. Since they are totally unprocessed by the scanner’s software they still carry loads of paper artifacts that we need to get rid of.

Why do we need to get rid of them in the first place? Well, in my opinion the idea should be to preserve the artwork as much as possible and since the paper artifacts aren’t an intended effect by the artist, they should be removed if possible.

If I had to draw a comparison, it’d be like watching an unrestored old film. It kind of has its charm to see the rotten photochemicals form holes on the negative and it gives the watcher kind of a "retro vibe”, but is it close to the actual footage as intended by the cinematographer? Probably not, right?

Then again, this all comes down to preference and there are some scanlators that handle this differently, e.g. whichever wretched soul translated this piece of Wehraboo fucking trash.

If that's the case, why have I chosen not to level the last chapter, you might ask. Simple. Surface blur looks fucking trash on printed color pages. Just look at this

Since that’s now established, what do I actually do? Well the process is quite simple. I drop the raw scan into a photoshop document, align it according to a template, I do some slight surface leveling, level the whole thing and, voilà, we’re done.

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Now, as you might be able to see, there are some problems associated with this approach, leading some people to dismiss anything that’s consequent with the levelling as “speed-scans”, however they can be largely counteracted. 

Especially the small white details in the hair seem to be largely “blown out” by the surrounding black areas. Let’s see what can be done about this…

First step: Select the affected areas with the brush tool in mask mode.

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Second step: Level those areas separately, make sure to “strengthen” the white details.

voilà

Third Step: Profit.

I realize that this is hardly pro stuff and that there might be better or more sophisticated cleaning “strategies” out there, but this is what I do to preserve some detail.

Also, please note how this whole thing is written from the first perspective throughout (except for one exception at the beginning) and that’s because I’m only one of the three cleaners currently working on TK. I expect the other two have other methods, which might or might not try to preserve those details like me. Even though Starscream likes to call me the Führer, I don’t try to assert myself over them and tell them what to do(lies, he threatens to shoot us if we don't do our job properly and on time, he also calls Bernd-Scans "the concentration camp"). All I can do is give feedback, so that’s why not every single page might have these measures put in place.