As a means of slacking off from actually working, I decided I’d make a post detailing the work that goes into preparing volume 1, chapter 1 of Kare to Karetto. for release. Maybe you’ll find it interesting. Maybe you don’t really care. People seem to enjoy my translation notes, so perhaps other behind-the-scenes type stuff could be enjoyable as well.

I’ve never had to do cleaning of this sort before, but it has thankfully become pretty formulaic and easy enough to repeat since I started. It adds on to the time spent working on all of this, sure, but it could be a whole lot worse. Although I think that if it were worse, I would just not choose to work on this series and wait for better scans, lol.

Also, as a heads-up, if you open any of these images in new tabs for a better view, there’ll be an automatic resize modifier on the end of the URL; you can trim that off to view images in actual fullsize.

Anyway, here’s an example of what any random page from volume 1 might look like. It’s presentable enough, but there’s some pretty obvious room for improvement.

First, we need to get rid of those page edges at the top and left sides of the image. Easy enough. A white brush can scrub them out, assuming your scan is high enough quality that the background actually is white.

Next is rotation/alignment. Guides will help out a lot with this. If you’re using a scan and not a digital image, there may be some distortion and it might be impossible to line every border up perfectly, but we’re just shooting for “good enough.”

Now, this next part isn’t strictly necessary, but I decided I would do it because of my previous releases. When I browse between various chapters of Ueno-san, all the pages are the same size, and that’s very satisfying to me. So I took note of the image sizes of each volume’s raws and decided I would scale them down to match the smallest (because scaling images up is usually bad news).

Volume 3’s images are 1082 x 1536 (and they look fantastic, btw), so I scale volume 1’s pages down to 1082 width to match. If the height is a little different, it’s not the end of the world; these ones usually end up around 1597, which is close enough that I’m not gonna complain.

Lastly, we want to do something about the colors. Trying to maintain consistency between pages that are fully in color is something of a nightmare, especially because color correction is something I have no experience doing.

Thankfully, Photoshop has some automatic adjustments you can make, and I’ve been relying on those. So far, the results look better and more consistent than I could achieve for all my fiddling around with levels and other options.

All that remains is what most people usually think of when they hear cleaning: text scrubbing. Karetto has been unusually generous in that almost all of the text is in speech bubbles, which means redrawing has had barely any part in this process. I guess that makes up for all the pre-production.

And that’s it for cleaning. Afterwards comes typesetting, but I don’t always do that right away. I tend to break projects up into Translation, Cleaning, and Typesetting for different times I feel like working (unless I’m marathoning all the way through a chapter in one sitting or something).

Here’s our finished product. Not too bad, eh? I’d like to think I’m doing a pretty passable job of cleaning, although if I had my way, I’d prefer I simply had better raws in the first place. But that’s just because I’m a lazy scanlator.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for giving me a reason to even have this blog. Karetto might be available next week (depends how much work I get done over the weekend). I’ll probably work on the next Ueno-san first, though. Peace.