Blambot offers a lot of good manga fonts for dialogue that are also very legible (like Anime Ace, Crime Fighter, SmackAttack, and Manga Temple). Mouth Breather is good for dramatic text.

The Design and SFX fonts can start hovering near that “hard to read” line, so be careful if you use any of those. Gorilla Milkshake is good, as are Seargant Six Pack and Badaboom.

If you can find a font manager application, I highly recommend it. Font collecting can become an addiction, and being able to browse them all easily and search for “the perfect” font for your page becomes difficult without a manager. I’m running OSX Leopard, and I use FontDoc. It imports the collections from Font Book, but you can enter custom text and view all the fonts in the collection at once. It’s simple, and it’s free. I’d like to hear what Windows users use (hint hint leave a comment).

Whatever you do, don’t use regular fonts like Times New Roman or Arial. Typesetting is part of the whole picture, and regular text fonts just don’t look or feel right. At the very least, download Anime Ace from Blambot and go with that ;)

Now that you have your fonts, check out the Intro to Typesetting!

Typesetting is an extremely important part of editing manga because one of the things readers focus on most is the text. It doesn’t matter how good your cleans are if your typeset is horrible (and vice versa). Likewise, a good script is important too. Don’t be afraid to ask the translator if it’s all right for you to do some minor editing while you do the typesetting. Oftentimes, translators focus too much on individual words and not enough on the flow of text on the page. Consider typesetting to be the bridge between cleaning and translating.

1. Entering text. Choose the Text tool in PS (or hit T). Your cursor now looks like a typical word processing cursor. Click and drag to make a square roughly in the center of your bubble. Your text will now be limited to the interior of that square, and you can type or paste your text. The other option is to just click once and start typing, but I’ve found the auto-wrapping in the text box to be convenient and sometimes pleasantly surprising.

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2. Choose an appropriate font. Visit this page for info about choosing your fonts.

3. Choose an appropriate font size. You don’t want your text crowding the bubble, but you also don’t want to make people squint to read it. Also be careful that text in adjacent bubbles don’t smoosh together.

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Obviously, the second example is TOO BIG!!

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4. Center your text. This may seem like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised. With the Text tool selected, you can hold down the CTRL key and click and drag your text. Alternatively, you can select the Move tool (or hit V) and use your arrow keys to nudge the text box around. What I like to do is make sure the corners of my text box are the same distance from the bubble on either side.

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5. Fix the shape of your text. Lots of people talk about making your text a diamond shape, but keep in mind that there are times when other elements may be more important than the shape of the text. By “diamond”, we mean the lines of text should be narrow at the top and bottom and wide in the middle. What you don’t want is uneven line lengths. Photoshop automatically wraps your text within the text box, and more often thant not, you will have to use the return key to push your words around to find the best shape for your text.

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This example isn’t a diamond in the strict sense of the shape, but the lines are narrower at the top and bottom and wider in the middle. It matches the shape of the bubble nicely.

Be careful you don’t obsess too much about the diamond shape and make the top or bottom line too narrow. It doesn’t literally have to be a diamond. It just needs a nice “round” shape.

This is what I meant by having uneven lines. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, but do your best to get a nice block of text.

Here’s an example of where an ugly block of text is necessary. If I made the left text box wider to accommodate a better shape, it would mush into the “Thanks” in the right text box.

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6. Be careful with hyphens. Some typesetters like to hyphenate words in order to get the perfect diamond block of text. Some typesetters absolutely hate to hyphenate a word unless there’s no other choice. I prefer to use hyphens sparingly, but whatever you decide to do, try to put the hyphen in the center of the word and not near the beginning or the end. Also make sure there are no leftover letters spilling into the next line, and DO NOT hyphenate one-syllable words.

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Choco-lates looks much better than Cho-colates.

Also, try your best not to hyphenate a word more than once. In the second example, you have one word spanning three lines.

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7. Aim for consistency. Don’t just throw your italics or bolds around at random. Try to match the text on the raw. Lots of people save italics for thoughts or make the text gray instead of black, and bold+italics is usually used for shouting. Whatever you choose, stick with it!

8. Stroke text that’s not on a white background. Black text on a gray background can be difficult to read. Black text on a pattern can be an eyesore, so what we need to do is outline the text in white. After you type out of your text, right click on that layer and choose Blending Options. Click on Stroke. From here, you can choose the color of the outline (usually white), the pixel width of the outline (3 px is usually good), and other settings (make sure it’s set to Outside).

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I vaguely remember someone asking about stroking text using GIMP. I came across this tutorial the other day and thought it did the trick simply and quickly: Gimpology

This looks like a pretty good Gimp site in general.

Other miscellaneous pointers:

• Try not to use vertical text. It’s just too hard to read. Keep it for the SFX.
• Use punctuation!! As much as you’re probably sick about people harping on you about grammar and punctuation, it really does make a huge difference in the overall quality of the typeset. Even if the Japanese text doesn’t have any punctuation, you could always add an ellipse (…) to show that the sentence is continuing in another bubble.
• Go easy on the warped text for SFX. All too often, it warps into illegibility.
• The Character palette is pretty straight forward, and if you hover your mouse over a button, the name will pop up. One thing to point out is the anti-aliasing (aa), which you want to keep on Smooth (sometimes Strong is good for shouting, though you can get the same effect from other things like bold or italics).
• I also recommend creating a Layer set (folder) and putting all your typeset layers in there. It often comes in handy down the road, and it keeps your Layers window from getting cluttered.
• Sometimes it can be tempting to just use the Move tool to mush a block of text into an ill-fitting bubble. However, don’t change the text height or width more than ~10%. If you stretch it any more than that, it really stands out from the rest of the text on the page and just plain looks bad.
• If you rotate your text so that it’s running vertically, make sure the bottom is oriented towards the center of the page. [spoiler][/spoiler]

The beauty of layers is that what you do on one layer won’t affect what’s on another layer. So if you ink an area black, redraw a white line on it, and then decide you don’t like the white line, how do you erase the white without erasing the black, too? Well if the white is on a different layer than the black, then the Eraser Tool won’t affect the black.

Also, when precleaning, always make a new layer before applying filters and leveling. That way, if you decide later that you don’t like what you’ve done, you can always start again with the original.

Other things to note about the layer window:

1) You can create folders to organize your layers.

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2) You can change the mode of a layer. Modes affect how the layers interact. In the beginning, don’t worry so much about it, but if you see a tutorial that says “Set Mode to Multiply” or “Set layer to Soft Light,” you’ll know where to look in PS.

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3) You have the option of merging layers together. Unless you need to combine them for the sake of filtering or changing layer modes (both somewhat advanced techniques), I strongly recommend NOT merging layers. If you have too many layers and they’re cluttering your Layer window, make some folders as shown above and dump them in there.

4) Remember, everyone will organize their layers differently, so find a system that works for you!

This Tool is not immediately intuitive the way something like the Brush Tool is because you need to select a point before you can begin cloning. First, select the Clone Stamp Tool:

Next, make sure you’re on the layer with the pattern that you need to clone. As always, I recommend DUPLICATING THAT LAYER and doing all your cloning on the duplicate so if you make a mistake, you can easily go back. You don’t want to start cloning on your raw only to discover that you screwed it up and have to redo everything.

With the Clone Tool selected, hold down the ALT key (Option for Macs) and notice that the cursor changes to something like crosshairs. Place the crosshairs in the area you need to clone from and click to set it. Now let go of ALT and move the cursor to another part of the page. Draw like you normally would with the Brush Tool.

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Notice that as you draw, the point where you ALT-clicked becomes a + and moves with your brush. The + will always stay the exact same distance from your brush as it was when you first began drawing. Keep that in mind!! (If you don’t want this to happen, uncheck the “Align” box, but for the rest of this tutorial, I will assume the Align box is checked).

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Here’s a more relevant example of a simple cloning. The text at the top of this frame needs to be removed, but you want to replace it with gray identical to what’s around it.

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To clone over the text, ALT-click in the gray area, and then brush over the text.

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Continue until the text is covered over. If the original text starts to appear in your cloning stroke, you’ve gone to far. Let go of the mouse button to end that stroke and start a new one.

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But remember how I said that the Clone Tool wasn’t necessarily intuitive? I guess I just meant that it’s easier to make mistakes. For instance, beware of gradients in the gray areas. If you ALT-click in a bad area, the redraw will look fake.

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The reason the redraw looks bad is because I ALT-clicked in an area where the gray was too light, and since the crosshair always stays the same distance as when you first begin drawing, it was always too light.

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The difference in grays is subtle in the panel, but very noticeable when you clone.

There are some other tricks for using the Clone Tool to redraw manga, but I’ll leave that for a more advanced tutorial.

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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If you recognize one of these pages as your own and you’d like it removed, please just let me know.

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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).

• 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.

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.

Choose the Crop tool () (or press C on the keyboard) and draw a rectangle around the page. Move the borders so that you crop out the black areas at the edges of the page.

Press Enter when you’re done. Easy, right? ^^

1. To straighten the page, we use the Measure Tool (), which is found in the same square as the Eyedropper () in Photoshop. In newer version of PS, this may be called the Ruler Tool, but it’s in the same location.

2. Draw a vertical line with it along one of the panel borders that we know should be perfectly horizontal or vertical. Click on one corner of the border and drag your cursor to the other corner. When you let go, there should be a thin gray line along the border. After you make the line, you can still move the points at each end to make it perfectly even.

3. Then go Image -> Rotate Canvas -> Arbitrary. The Measure Tool has already filled in a value in the Arbitrary window, so just click OK. Basically, it takes the guesswork out of how much a page should be rotated and measures it for you.

After clicking OK, the page should have rotated slightly so that the line you drew with the Measure tool is now perfectly horizontal.

Due to the crappy print quality of some magazines and varying scan quality, sometimes rotating for one line will make another line worse. It’s up to you to use your judgement on what looks best overall.

Thanks to ExiledVip3r for the PS icons – I should use those more ^^

1. Borders must be straight. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised.
2. Borders must be a constant width. Simple again, right?
3. Borders must have sharp 90° corners (unless one of the lines is diagonal).

As always, different groups will have different parameters for their scanlations. For Shannaro, we had 2 px border lines on a 1200 px high raw. For M7, we have 8 px lines on a 3600 px high raw that gets resized. Regardless, the three rules stated above will apply to virtually every group.

PENCIL TOOL & PAINT BUCKET METHOD (WITH GUIDES)

To me, this is a conceptually very simple method, and the guides will assure accuracy.

1) MAKE A NEW LAYER FOR YOUR BORDERS.

2) Use guides to determine where you want your borders to be. Click on the ruler that’s at the top or left side of the page and hold the button down as you drag the cursor onto the page. You’ll see a dotted line appear, which will turn blue when you let go of the mouse button. If you don’t see a ruler, press CTRL-R (Command-R for Macs).

Place a guide for every border you’re going to draw. To move a guide, use the Move Tool and drag it exactly where you want it.

No page will ever have perfectly aligned borders, so don’t worry if you have to clip off a few pixels from the panels. Try to keep the raw borders outside the guides.

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3) Choose the Pencil Tool and set the width to whatever your group’s standard is (e.g. 3 pixels wide). Make sure you’re on your Borders Layer!!!

4) Start at one corner of a panel border, hold down the Shift key, and draw a straight line along the border. Your Pencil Tool will snap to the guides, so this process should be pretty quick and painless. Do that for all the vertical and horizontal borders.

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[/spoiler]See how the raw border is on the outside of my red border line? You will lose a few pixels from the image with this method. If you are clipping too much from the panel, try rotating the page differently to straighten it out. Sometimes, correcting for one border will screw up another. Do the best you can.

*** If you have a DIAGONAL panel border, use the Line Tool set to the appropriate width and make sure there is a check in the box for anti-aliasing.

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Note that you can still set a guide for each end of the diagonal line.

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5) Once you have redrawn all of the panel borders, select the Paint Bucket Tool, and make sure “Contiguous” and “Anti-aliased” are checked on the toolbar at the top. Now dump white in the space between the borders you just drew.

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Notice the area outside the borders is perfectly white with the raw border and all the dust and dirt covered.

6) If you covered over any SFX or speech bubbles, you’ll have to erase that part of the border with the Eraser Tool. Set the opacity of the border layer to 75% so you can see which areas need to be erased.

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Top left: The border layer is covering the SFX.
Top right: Reduce the opacity of the border layer.
Bottom left: Erase the border area covering the SFX.
Bottom right: Restore the opacity of the border layer to 100%
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Also, if a panel goes right to the edge of a page, it does NOT get a border.

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After thinking long and hard, I decided that this was the quickest method for doing borders with the least chance for messing up. Also, it should work for pretty much everyone regardless of your group’s requirements.

If your group uses a border 4 px or wider, there may be gaps left in the corners since the 4 px Pencil brush looks like a + instead of a square. Just go back and add the missing pixels with the Pencil at 3 px.

Or if you’re feeling daring, you can make a square-shaped brush just for doing borders (my Bleach border brush is 8 px by 8 px). When I have time, I’ll put up a short guide for making custom Photoshop brushes since it’s so insanely easy…