Cleaning a Manga - The Struggle is Real

Translating manga is fun. I don't make any money off of it (maybe someday) but I still do it, not only because it is good practice, but because I genuinely enjoy it. It also takes a lot of time, but it's not because translation is hard, it's because putting the translation in is hard.

There are two different ways I translate manga. Sometimes, I just replace all the speech bubbles with English text. Simple. Sometimes, I pull out all the stops and edit every sound effect out of every panel, then replace them with my own, English equivalents. That means it takes me a long, long time.

I own Photoshop and I'm quite proficient in using it. There was a time when I thought paying for Photoshop is asinine, since it cost hundreds of dollars, but considering how much I use it, I don't regret it at all. Photoshop CS6 is the latest version that doesn't require a BS subscription fee, so that's what I've got.

I'll be using this image for a quick example.

The first thing I do when I go to translate a manga is adjust the levels. This isn't always necessary, but it can turn grey paper into white paper, and grey ink into black ink. It's also a handy way to clean up a few JPEG artifacts in simple line art like manga. I also rotate and skew the image to fix any

Levels adjusted.

Editing out sound effects isn't extremely hard, but it is very time consuming. On the page you can see three different places with Japanese characters to edit out; the は――っ in the text box and the ツ to the right of Fuuka are against a plain white background, making them extremely easy to edit out with just the paintbrush tool.

But look at that バ above Yotsuba's head. see where it is? That's right, it's on top of the scenery. Since this is a flat image, if I want to see what's behind it... Well, I can't see what's behind it. If I want to make it disappear, I have to go in and redraw what I assume was supposed to be there. There are several tools at my disposal to do this, but I mostly use the clone stamp tool and the paint brush.

The clone stamp is a good solution when there are lots of patterns, such as dot matrices representing greys or clothing patterns that don't fold with the clothing realistically. Unfortunately, in this case, it is not a good fit. Here's why. Look at the image above. I have removed the upper portion of the left stroke of the バ by sampling the wall to the left using the clone stamp too. It looks decent so far, but look what happens when I go down.

Ugh. There goes that idea. Since the image is drawn from a diagonal perspective, the lines widen farther to the left, and don't match up to their horizontal counterparts. The most efficient way to fix this will be to erase the black character and draw in the greyish lines myself. After doing a rough redraw, here's what I came up with.

This is just an example, so I didn't go for perfect, but all I did was fill the ハ with white and use the brush tool. After sampling the grey of the lines on the wall, I reduced the size of the brush to one pixel, clicked the end of a line, then shift-clicked the other side of the gap where the line was supposed to meet to draw a straight line.

After I had drawn all the lines, They were a little blurry and darker than they should be (they still are, as you can see if you look carefully). So I used the dodge tool, aiming for highlights, which effectively took some of the anti-aliasing off the edges as well as lightening up the lines a bit. I did end up using the clone stamp tool to clone the curb where it had been cut off by the バ. I sampled the curb to the left of it and just dropped it on top of it. With such a small area to cover, the perspective thing was not an issue.

All of this was just to fix a few straight lines on a wall. When a sound effect covers a person, intricate scenery, or gradient patterns, things become really difficult. Take a look at the GIF image at the head of this post. That page took me a long time, because It had huge, bold-faced sound effects covering up lots of scenery. There are two pages very much like this, so I was able to do some copy-paste wizardry between them, but after that it was all up to me.

Once I have edited everything out, it is time to put in my own sound effects. Using freely available fonts such as Badaboom and Death Rattle (and many, many others), I decide what onomatopoeia to put in. If I'm ever struggling to come up with something, I use The Jaded Network's SFX database, a very handy resource for this kind of thing. After figuring the font and words out, it's just a matter of getting them to look like the original. I use text warp and blending options such as stroke and pattern overlay to make sure everything's perfect.

The whole thing would be a lot easier if mangaka would just release text-free versions of their manga, but that would also render my experience more or less useless. For now, I guess I'm just going to hone my skills.