Some comments and help on my first cleaning work

[ElvenMoonKnight]

My greetings to the whole MangaHelpers community!

I started my scanlating "career" a few days ago, wanting to make a greek scanlation of Anedoki, since I'm a fan of Kawashita Mizuki since i read Ichigo 100%.
I went through a few tutorials to get started and thought I could try making a HQ work. Though, it was more difficult than I thought, but I continue to do my best, knowing that my current work is still MQ.
At some point, I considered making a LQ clean of a page to see the difference. I was surprised to see that the LQ clean (which took about 5 minutes to be completed) was pretty similar to my usual cleans (which take about 30 to 45 minutes) and I'm afraid that I'm still far away from making a HQ clean. However, it might be that my untrained eyes are deceiving me. :p
So I thought that I should post a page's both fast and slow cleans, to receive some comments from the most experienced cleaners.


http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/5688/anedokich00123.th.jpg (http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/5688/anedokich00123.jpg)



http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/6668/anedokich00123b.th.png (http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/6668/anedokich00123b.png)



http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/3779/anedokich00123.th.png (http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/3779/anedokich00123.png)


Thanks in advance for all your replies and if it's possible I would appreciate any tips on how to "upgrade" my cleans to HQ. :D

[hatsuharupeace]

Both pages overlevelled, you can tell, the bow in the middle panel is practically black, there's hardly any more gray present. Also, I think you're overdenoizing a bit too much as well, so tone it down a fair bit.

[ElvenMoonKnight]

The fast clean is intended to be overleveled on black, cause otherwise it has too much dust. The slow clean is my mistake uploading the wrong file due to hastiness. Corrected now.

[unok-kun]

I can't see the second clean (it's not loading) but the first one is indeed overleveled and I think overdenoised too. Anyway, you should resize basing on the height, not on the width (at least that's what all scanlators do, but if you wanna be different, go ahead). Usual heights are 1200px or 1100px, and sometimes 1500px.

[Doragon]

Judging by the first one, I'm willing to bet that you used NeatImage as a denoising program. As far as I know, NeatImage can't give you a HQ clean without using certain methods. The best it could give you in speedscans is an LQ-MQ. Topaz is also a good denoising program, but it too won't give you a HQ clean if you'll be using it for speedscans. I can't see the second one, but for the fast clean, at least try using the burn tool to darken the areas that are supposed to be black. And for everything else, well as the other two said, it's overdenoised.

[unok-kun]

Now I can see the second one, and well, it's better, but it's still a bit overburned, specially with the white parts in the hair. And well, I'm not really good at saying if it's overdenoised or not, but I'd say it is too.

I think you're overrating the quality (well, most people is actually). For me an HQ clean would be like M7 or Ju-Ni do: everything's perfect, whites are all white, blacks are all black, everything's anti-aliased, redraws are perfect, even greys are redrawn (not with a filter, but redrawn with a pattern)... Your slow cleaning is at most MQ imo. You can't possibly get an HQ clean with filters, and it'd take a lot of work and time.

But let me give you a tip: don't burn the blacks with the page resized because it's much easier to overburn the edges. If you burn full-size, it won't be noticed as much as before (although filters won't work the same way full-size...)