Aside from overall quality, I was messing around with some Jump SQ raws and discovered that the High Pass filter is really good for darkening line art that has gray tone under it. So it’s great for MQ cleans where you don’t want to spend much time on the gray areas. Also, this does not destroy gray tones the way a denoise program can.

Additionally, it works fine regardless of your raw page size.

This method was passed on to me from abu_89, who says “Warning. Excessive usage of this technique is like drinking alcohol. You know what happens– it might seem cool at the time, but in the end, it just means more work for you.”

Use sparingly!!

For the Jump SQ pages I was playing with, I first precleaned using the diffuse filter.

1. Duplicate the leveled layer twice.
2. On the top duplicate, use the High Pass Sharpening Filter. Go Filter > Other > High Pass. Choose 15 px radius.
3. Set that layer to Soft Light mode.
4. Add a Gaussian Blur. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Choose 1-4 px (I liked 2.5 px).
5. Merge down to combine the two duplicated layers.
6. Now you should have your original raw layer, a leveled/diffused layer, and a high pass layer. I like to keep all three so that if I ever want to go back and change something, I won’t have to start from scratch.

Like abu said, this method can be abused by repeating it over and over again, but after once or twice, the quality really takes a dive, so please DON’T USE THIS MORE THAN ONCE PER PAGE.

If you are forced to use a small raw (1200 px height or so), then tweak the settings accordingly : something like High Pass 10 px radius and Gaussian Blur 2 px. These numbers aren’t set in stone, but again, keep an eye on your page and make sure you don’t over-do it ^^

Thanks to Yumi for the original tutorial.

1. Make a copy of the raw background – right click on the Background Layer and choose to duplicate it. Do your leveling on this copy so that you can always go back and try again.

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2. Make sure the Mode is set to Grayscale. Go to the Image menu at the top, go to Mode, choose Grayscale.

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3. From the same Image menu, go Image -> Adjustments -> Replace Color. Set Fuzziness to 80, Lightness to 100 and click the dot-button for Image. Your cursor will now appear as a dropper tool so just click anywhere on the page where it should be white, but isn’t. Click OK. The page should appear very washed out now.

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4. Now we level. See the Intro to Leveling tutorial for an explanation of the Level window. Move the white slider to the left of the white peak, but don’t move the black slider yet.

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For this method, you can over-level the whites a bit as long as you don’t touch the blacks (so you can move the white slide further to the left than the Intro tells you to). Don’t try to get rid of the darkest specks, though, or you’ll sacrifice the rest of the page for a handful of specks. Those you can remove later.

5. Duplicate this leveled layer. Set the copy to 50% opacity and set mode to Multiply (on the Layers window, where it usually says “Normal,” open the drop down menu and choose “Multiply.”)

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6. Go under Filters -> Stylize -> Diffuse. Choose anisotropic and click ok.

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7. Level your blacks now on both the leveled layer and the diffused layer. You can darken the blacks quite a bit now and they’ll look good. (NOTE: Diffuse makes straight lines often look quite squiggly… So be careful with it.) The reason we can get away with over-leveling the whites in step 4 is because we diffuse the blacks to reduce jagged edges. The white slider on the diffuse layer might also need to be tweaked a tiny bit.

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8. Voila! Your page is precleaned!

Don’t be afraid to go through this process a couple times and tweak things differently. Sometimes I’ll have a couple layers with different levels, and then I toggle them on and off to decide which I like best.

After this, you may want to try using the High Pass Sharpening Filter to make your lines a little darker.

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Adjustment Layers can help with two main things when cleaning:

1. Original leveling.
2. Cleaning blacks and whites.

This is because when you use adjustment layers to do leveling, you can change the levels as you work!

The button for adjustment layers is on the bottom of your layers window.

Using adjustment layers for leveling
Click it and go to “levels.”
A normal levels window will appear but instead of just applying the levels to your image, it will create a layer.
In the image, I have the levels layer selected.

Because your levels are on a layer, you can show/hide it like other layers. And now, if you double-click on the layer, you can adjust the levels whenever you need to! It’s extremely convinent to do all leveling in this manner because if you don’t level the page perfectly the first time, you can always go back and edit it.

Using adjustment layers for Blacks/Whites
By using the adjustment layers you can easily max out levels to spot dirt on your page without ruining your original levels.
For example, if you use an adjustment layer to max out blacks, dirt in your whites will show up significantly better.

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And vice-versa for finding white dirt in blacks.

Thanks, ani!!

Each scanlation group will have different tips and tricks for precleaning and denoising a page. This tutorial is designed to give you a general understanding of what leveling is and how it works.

IMPORTANT: Before doing anything, I recommend making a duplicate layer of the raw and doing all your level adjustments on the duplicate. That way, the raw will be untouched in case you want to go back and try again.

First, open your raw in Photoshop. In the Layers window, right click on the raw’s layer (probably named “Background”) and choose “Duplicate Layer.”

Here is an example of a raw page:

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Pretty dull and gray, isn’t it? Leveling is a process that makes light grays look white and dark grays look black.

In Photoshop, go to the Image menu > Adjustments > Levels. These are the levels for the raw page:

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This graph shows you the distribution of pixels on your page. If there are a lot of bars on the right side, you have a lot of white. If there are a lot of bars on the left side, you have a lot of black. The middle represents grays.

Make sure the channel is set to GRAY since we are working in grayscale. If it’s not, go back and set the mode to grayscale.

First we’ll deal with the big peak on the right side. These are the pixels that should be white, but instead look gray. Let’s make them white by sliding the little white triangle to the left. Stop near the left base of the peak. As you move the triangle to the left, the pixels that were light gray become closer to white. If you go too far, you will over-level. Notice the number in the third input box decreases from 255 as the slider moves left.

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Now the page should look pretty washed out since we just made the pixels whiter. To fix this, let’s focus on the left side of the graph. Take the little black triangle and slide it to the very beginning of the black peak. This makes the dark gray pixels appear darker.

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Now we need to adjust the gray slider to the right to make the whole page a little darker. Be careful because this is the easiest place to over-level! Zoom into the page and watch the lines as you adjust the sliders. You don’t want them to become too pixelated! You just want to darken them up a little.

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If you over-level, then all your grays pixels are converted to either black or white, and this makes the lines look pixelated. Over-leveled blacks have a jagged look, and you can see ‘steps’ in the line. Gray pixels make lines look smooth (visit here if you don’t know what anti-aliasing is). The trick here is to remove the grays we don’t want, but keep the grays we do want.

Here are examples of what a page should look like and what it shouldn’t look like.

Good: [spoiler]

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Bad: [spoiler]

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If you want, layer these pages in photoshop so you can compare the differences.

Notice that there is still some dirt in the white areas. Sorry, folks, but you’ll have to remove this by hand. Same with the blacks – they will almost ALWAYS have to be inked over by hand. Don’t try to use leveling to get rid of all the dirt!

Also, when in doubt, under-level. It’s easier to fix a page that has been under-leveled than one that has been over-leveled.

Please remember that this is a basic guide to good leveling, and that different scan groups may use more complicated techniques with filters and plug-ins and such. Nevertheless, these are the basic principles of of the Leveling Window.

If you are still unsure of what OVER-LEVELING is, check out the Anti-alias Guide.

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Once you feel you have a good understanding of how the Leveling Window works, try this method for precleaning your raw.