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]

This is a compilation of different ways to get nice pointy speedlines without going crazy.

First use the Line Tool to draw your speed lines.

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Then go to the Filter Menu > Blur > Motion Blur

Make sure the Angle matches the direction your line is going in, and tweak the distance to determine just how pointy the line is.

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Make your first anchor at the tip of the speed line. Make your second and third anchors at the base of the speed line. Close the path by clicking on the first anchor. Fill the path.

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You can also use the Polygonal Lasso and fill, but make sure the tips aren’t too thin. You might have to extend your selection past the actual point. (Thanks Irec ^^)

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First, set your Brush Tool to the appropriate width and then set the Minimum Diameter around 35%. You can set that higher or lower as you see fit.

Again, make the first Pen anchor on the tip of the speed line. Make a second anchor at the base of the line, and then close the path by clicking on the first anchor again. Basically, it folds the line back on itself.

Now right click, choose Stroke, and make sure the Simulate Pressure box IS checked.

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1. Download the .pat file from this website (or any other site).

2. Go to the folder that your Photoshop application is located in.

3. Open the Presets folder.

4. Open the Patterns folder. (Or for brushes, go to the Brushes folder. Brushes are .abr files).

5. You should see other .pat files here. Put your new .pat files in here, too.

6. If Photoshop is open, quit out and then reopen it.

7. Your new patterns (or brushes) can be loaded from the usual menu now ^_^

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!

For those looking to make things more convenient for their readers without sacrificing quality, we’re going to check out the option in the File menu called “Save for Web.”

After you choose Save for Web, a new window will pop up. Look for the tab labeled “2-Up” and click on it. That will let you view the original version of your page and the about-to-be-saved version side by side.

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For the settings, choose the drop down menu and look for PNG-8. For me, it says PNG-8 128 Dithered, but the important part is that it says PNG-8.

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Ok, now look for the box where it says “Diffusion” and open the drop down menu. Choose “No Dither.”

Now what we’re about to do is choose how many shades of gray we use in our image. See the input box for Colors? Right now it’s set to 128. We’re going to decrease that and by doing so, we make our file smaller.

For something like Bleach, Naruto, and most shonen series, you can get away with 24 shades of gray. It might sound small, but it’s not. Using the 2-Up window, go ahead and zoom in on your page and examine the gray areas. If you’re not satisfied, increase the number of grays.

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Here are two versions of the same page: one is saved with the “Save as” option and one is saved with the “Save for Web” option set to 24 Colors like above. Can you tell the difference?

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The first file is 568 KB. The second file is 200 KB. I’ll do the math for you: If a volume is 200 pages, a regular Save as volume will be 113.6 MB. A Save for Web volume will be 40 MB. That’s a huge difference!

As I said before, the number of Colors to select from the Save for Web settings depends on the series and how many gray tones there are. For most shoujo, you can get away with 32 colors. Keep an eye on the 2-Up windows, however, and zoom in if you need to. It will be obvious when you need to add more colors:

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Doubled to 60 colors, this gradient is smoothed out like in the original psd.

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Even taking the number of Colors to 60 doesn’t greatly increase the file size. The Bleach page above with 60 colors is still only 256 KB – still much less than 568 KB.

My suggestion is to take 5 minutes of your time and just play with the settings for the series you are working on.

• Use “Save for Web” to save your pages for release
• Choose PNG-8 (not PNG-24)
• Choose No Dither
• Reduce the number of Colors to 24 (or whatever you decide)
• Compare the save to the original using the 2-Up tab
• Adjust the number of Colors if needed (keep an eye on gradients)
• Save

Anyway, I tried this method on an old paperback, and it worked like a charm.

Video Tutorial: How I Debind Books With A Hairdryer

Here’s a gradient that goes from black to white, and then here’s the same gradient with the Film Grain Filter (settings 8/2/2). See how both the black and white ends are more gray?

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If you want the black side to be black or if you want the white side to be white, I suggest using a Gradient Overlay, which can be found under Blending Options when you right click on the appropriate layer.

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Your Layer Style window will probably look different from mine, but the contents should be similar. For now, let’s focus on Gradient Overlay. These are the default settings:

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Now this is where I throw you a curve ball. We already made our gradient using the Gradient Tool, and we already added a film grain. So why are we adding a Gradient Overlay that obscures the Film Grain? Well we’re actually going to use an OPACITY gradient, not a color gradient.

Click on the drop down menu next to the default gradient to bring up a window with more gradient options. The default gradient is foreground -> background. The one to the right of that is Foreground to Transparent. Choose that one.

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Now double click on the actual gradient (not the arrow for the drop down menu). This lets you modify and customize the gradient.

So let’s start by trying to make the top of our square completely black, and then fading to a light gray at the bottom. As you can see, we’re starting off with the black at the wrong end of the square.

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As the picture states, the top sliders affect opacity and the bottom sliders affect color. We’ll keep color black since we’re trying to make one end of our square black. We have to reverse the opacity sliders, however, and make 0% on the left and 100% on the right. If you click on the top left slider (the black one) you’ll see a number pop up in the Opacity box below. Change it to 0%, and then do the same for the right slider (change that one to 100%).

Now the top edge of the square fades to solid black! You can drag the sliders around and adjust the opacity to tweak the gradient exactly how you want it.

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If you want the bottom to fade to white, just switch the settings around.

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So we have the original black -> white; with film grain; with black -> transparent; with transparent -> white

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After this highly-specific explanation, the more mundane uses of the Gradient Overlay should be apparent ^^

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.