Dealing with high resolution monitors

[Toboe LoneWolf]

I'm a beginner Manga Editor, and something that worries me is how to make whites white and blacks black...when everything already looks that way. Okay, I know that makes little sense, but when I switch from my high resolution laptop monitor to the regular monitor at home, I can blatantly see the black/white patches I used when leveling didn't take care of everything.

Raw || My Scan

After I did the grayscale/level step, there were still fuzzy noise patches on Neji's pants (panel in upper right hand corner) and in his hair (last panel). I also used white on Neji's face in the second panel in the middle. On my laptop, it looks all nice and clean to me, but when I go on a diff monitor I can blatantly see the streaks and I cringe.

Yes, I know about denoising, but I don't have that program. Also, I'm not really looking into doing super HQ scans and redrawing every page; it's just a doujin. XP

I just want to know how to deal with a high resolution monitor, since I can't tell when I'm leveling just how far to go -- looking at examples here I see comments of "bad leveling because there's still dust" and no matter how far I zoom in, I swear to you, I can't see it.

 

[Yarias]

Are you sure your laptop's monitor is calibrated correctly?

 

[Toboe LoneWolf]

*shrugs* Laptop defaults? It's not the colors that are weird -- going back and forth from a "regular" monitor to my laptop doesn't turn red into orange or stuff like that.

In the example above, can you see the areas where I used black/white?

 

[Vato Loco!]

Ok, Since you're on a laptop I'll tell you what I did (I'm also on a laptop). First thing you need to do is go here and calibrate your monitor. For gamma just make sure it's 2.2 on quickgamma since calibrating that will throw you off on a laptop. Now, after you've done that increase your brightness (if you can) to the fullest because default brightness of laptops suck. Once that's done Look at your image. You'll probably see the dust, however, if you still don't here's a neat little trick that's guaranteed to show all the dust for both blacks and whites. On a laptop you have this neat little advantage of being able to tilt your screen. If the screen is tilted backwards every single piece of dust in white will be revealed. If it's tilted forwards (towards your keyboard) it'll reveal the dust in the blacks. I use this to make sure my blacks and whites end up being perfectly done when I'm both QC'ing and Cleaning.

Now, addressing your actual image since there's a problem with that more than anything. Your level was good, only a little bit under leveled from what I would have done. However, anymore leveling to remove all of the dust would severely overlevel the image. Now, the problem with this image is the way that it was scanned; that being, the pages weren't debound and the doujin was just scanned as is. This meant that the pages weren't flat on the scanner and things such as what happened to your image (a warp and gutter shadow near the edge) were bound to happen. For this image, as annoying as it'll probably be, I recommend you just level it a little bit more (and I mean only 1 or 2 digits) and then going through wit the brush tool to clean the dust up while making sure you're tilting your screen accordingly. Check here in the levels section for good tips and here for some more good tips on cleaning(though the second one is more for cleaning mag raws than anything.)

Hope that helps.

 

[chiresakura]

For double checking blacks and whites, I recommend using adjustment layers and cranking the leveling real high.

This is a great way to speck check at the end without making yourself go blind.

 

[Toboe LoneWolf]

Wow, thanks guys! Hopefully I can get good enough at this that I can actually do an "official" Edited Manga someday.