Guess I'll comment on this. My way of doing things is a little different than most, in part because I'm a solo group (except that I get a translation check from Procyon, which helps the quality a lot). Also I'm using a very old version of PS that I was able to get free.
Digital copies are definitely easier to use, but I do most of my work from scans, both that I've done myself and from others. With rare exceptions, I only do manga that I've purchased myself whether or not I'm scanning it myself. Unlike most, when I scan a volume, I don't destroy it; I break the spine in several places, and then simply press it flat to the scanner using a flat object. If done right I usually get good quality virtually all the way to the center and the manga (usually) remains in one piece, though sometimes a page or two will fall out.
Once I have the scans, since I'm doing all phases myself, is where I start doing things differently. I work one page at a time start to finish, clean, translate, and letter all in one fell swoop.
Clean: 1. Rotate the image. 2. Crop the image 3. Repair the image. Erase glue tracks, tears, creases and the like. Occasionally fixing a little darkening or blurring at the page fold if I couldn't get it quite flat. If the repairs are simple, I usually do it directly to the image. If not, I'll do it as part of step 4. 4. Do redraws. I do these on a sparate layer which makes it easy to flip between unaltered image and redrawn image. This is mostly removing text from over artwork as shown in Malibu's video, though our methods vary a little. I also by preference leave Japanese sound effects in place and place English next to them, even when it's on white space and easily removed. 5. Now I finally level the image. If it's a quality scan, this can be easy (one layer with maybe just a little extra around some of the edges using a second layer). If the scans are poor, like my old scanner did, this can take some effort with several layers using carefully contrived and feathered masks. 6. Clean the image. I use a white fill layer with a mask to cover any text, dirt, paper grains and such. If there's white text on black, I use a second black fill layer with a mask to cover it. Any text over a tone or other artwork was already covered in step 4.
Translate and letter: I'm not fluent in Japanese so anything I don't immediately understand, I transcribe. Since I don't know readings for most kanji, I use optical character recognition on this step (unless it's hand written), correcting the many errors it makes. Once everything on the page I don't understand is transcribed, I translate it using rikaikun (a program that defines Japanese words under the cursor) and online tools including dictionaries, phrase definitions, slang dictionaries, contraction and shorthand references, SFX references, and others. And then I typeset the page. I often typeset as I translate.
Then I'll generate a completed test image of the page, and look it over for anything that doesn't look right, read right, or whatever. Then I finally move on to the next page.
Doing it this way means that sometimes I go back and make changes in previous pages as I gain better understanding from future pages, but altering an image is quick and easy so that's not a big deal.
Once I've done all the pages, I go back through the whole thing and look for translation errors, revisit anything I didn't quite understand, and look for anything that doesn't hang together or simply comes out strange. Then I go over it and look for missing text, verify fonts and punctuation, spellcheck, image size, and so on. Then I do one last read through for any final change and it's ready to go... to the next step that is. What I've just done is the QC version.
Now (in most cases) I send it to Procyon (I really appreciate his help.) along with any comments or concerns I still have about it. He sends back to me any errors, especially translation errors, he spots along with any suggested changes he has. I make the changes that seem good to me (I've also sometimes caught errors at this point) and send the results back to him. Often that becomes the final version, though sometimes there are a few more back and forth's before we're both satisfied with it.
And then finally I add the credits page and voila, upload it to Dynasty. Now that was no trouble at all, right?
Concerning how long it takes me? Well that varies with the source material. The fastest I've ever done a complete page start to finish was 8 minutes (that was page 20 of chapter 5 of Secret of the Princess.) It was a digital source and I needed no translation of the small amount of text on the page. The slowest? That's hard to say. There have been times I've taken at least 3 or 4 hours on one page. Afterword pages also take a long time since not only is there a lot of text, it's usually all hand written, and it can be very hard sometimes to figure out what that kanji really is, especially if the mangaka is using shorthand. Let's see, when I did vol 2 of The Last Uniform, I was probably averaging a little over a half hour per page. What I've done so far on Age 15 I've probably been averaging an hour to an hour and a half per page. Over time, I've gotten much faster then I was at the start.
And wow, a huge wall of text. This may be the longest comment I've ever posted.
last edited at Jan 21, 2017 9:07PM
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