Vato Loco! HQ attempt 1!

[Vato Loco!]

Well here's a try. If you read my "Help re-frame this.." thread then you'll know this was originally for the OPHQST test. The test was being able to clean 2 pages of this type of raw in under 24 hours (I estimate my finishing time at 4.5-5 hours). Unfortunately due to college exams and other school related things, I failed that test miserably, and am now just getting done cleaning this 2 weeks later , so I decided to post it here.

Feel free to critique, point out anything wrong with it and so on...

Here's the raw:


and my cleaned page:

[Allashandra]

I do believe this is your best page yet! You did a great job on it! The blacks and whites are very well done. The grays are good too. If my group had a test to get in you would have passed with flying colors with this page.

I believe there are still a few things that you can get a little better at too. But we all have things we can improve. I think I would have gone with 2px for the borders on this manga. I don't know if OPHQST had any guidelines for border width so I don't know. I would have redone the speed lines in panels 2,4 & 6, or atleast cleaned up between them a little with white. The image should be in Grayscale and was in Index. I also don't know if you had any guidelines for page dimensions but the page was 799 X 1181. Most scan groups have atleast a height they want the pages at either 1100 or 1200 px. All of these things I am pointing out are just stuff to make it even more HQ than it already is. Again great job!

[Vato Loco!]

Thanks Allashandra.

About the index; my psd file is in grayscale, but it seems that when I save the file it converted it into index. I saved this file using Shinwei's "png-8 16 no dither" setting in the "save for web" option, from his cleaners compendium tut. Is there a way to prevent this using the "save for web" option or should I just use the "save as" option to save as png instead, like I've done with some of my other cleaning attempts?

About the image being 1181. I don't know how that happened. I originally re-sized it to 1200 px at the beginning of the project. Could it be because I cropped the image after I re-sized it?

[Allashandra]

You're welcome.

Hmmm well... Yes you are correct that saving that way saves it in index form for some reason. Strange. I would say to ask the group you are working with or wanting to work then. What I have my cleaners do is save it the default way of .png for our speed scans without interlacing. I reserve the save for web .png for the last step before release since it is compressing the image.

Yes croping after the you have resized will reduce the dimensions.

[Vato Loco!]

Well... actually I'm not part of any scan group, and I don't think I could be of much use for a weekly scan group right now. I was actually going to see if I could join TMI as a cleaner. I think I could be of much more use cleaning FMA monthly than trying to clean a weekly manga like OP, and after all FMA is one of my top three favorite mangas. Right up there with OP and Trigun.

[Allashandra]

Your hired! I'll send you a PM with the details.

[Vato Loco!]

Cool.

[Fnuckale]

I can't see why is indexed a problem.. we always save our pages indexed and never got complains about that.

Either way, good job dude. Other than what Allashandra pointed I would rate this HQ right away if it wasn't for the lineart, I really dislike the lineart when it's like that (it looks all grungy and faded at certain areas.. like Franky's neck on the 5th frame.. err.. well it's pretty much completely like that, but that's where it stands out a lot).
I would also make the stroke for the sfx on the fourth frame a little thicker.

Definitely your best work so far and I loved how you used that same pattern we used to use

[Vato Loco!]

I can't see why is indexed a problem.. we always save our pages indexed and never got complains about that.

Either way, good job dude. Other than what Allashandra pointed I would rate this HQ right away if it wasn't for the lineart, I really dislike the lineart when it's like that (it looks all grungy and faded at certain areas.. like Franky's neck on the 5th frame.. err.. well it's pretty much completely like that, but that's where it stands out a lot).
I would also make the stroke for the sfx on the fourth frame a little thicker.

Definitely your best work so far and I loved how you used that same pattern we used to use

Thanks.

Yeah, in retrospect I should have gone through and re-stroked the lines under Frankys chin and re-done the speed lines.

[Fnuckale]

I think the precleaning was the actual problem. Although the raw does contain that problem to begin with perhaps it can be fixed before going to the cleaning stage.

Either way it doesn't matter much right now, best of luck in the future!

[Vato Loco!]

I think the precleaning was the actual problem. Although the raw does contain that problem to begin with perhaps it can be fixed before going to the cleaning stage.

Either way it doesn't matter much right now, best of luck in the future!

Pre-cleaning? Do you mean the leveling stage? If so then yeah, I need do need to practice more, or is it something else entirely?

[Fnuckale]

Leveling is one thing. You can use many different filters in different sequances upon precleaning, just to make your cleaning job easier and/or the page quality better.[br]Posted on: February 21, 2007, 01:26:42 PM_________________________________________________My page would look pretty much like this after precleaning.

[Vato Loco!]

Ahh, ok. It's something I'll have to look into and experiment with then.[br]Posted on: February 21, 2007, 01:36:59 PM_________________________________________________

My page would look pretty much like this after precleaning.

Woah, that's much better. How'd you do that?

[Fnuckale]

<.<
I'll let you experiment young one, I'm sure you will be able to reach a better result eventually