Cleaning How do I clean this page?

[hellangel9x]

(sr for my english)
i'm a totally newbie/noob when it comes to cleaning
so this is the page: http://i.imgur.com/vkmUF30.jpg (original size)
I tried to level and realized when setting black point, I would easily lose the leaves (pine needles? or whatever they are...) (; v ;')

can you help me please? thank you very much!

 

[Gradonil_Ral]

It's a tough page, I admit. To get a decent result you should either select the pine needles and use layer mask for them or copy them to a different layer and use different settings when leveling/denoising it. It will involve quite a bit of manual labor.

You can also try sharpening the page a little before denosing and leveling it, and then using burn/dodge tools to finish it up, but the result will be worse and you probably won't save that much more time.

Is this a title page from a tankoubon? If so, there might be other versions of this image available online. Maybe even some colored ones. It might be easier to convert/use those instead of focusing on getting a decent result from this scan.

Still, the first thing you should ask yourself is:
"How much time do I really wanna spend on cleaning a page that an average reader will spend 1.5-2secs looking at?"

 

[Mana Light]

i think every cleaners can't do that page without losing details so you can ignore that ~.~
__
btw you should scan with 600 dpi for tank raws and don't upload to imgur or tumblr because these site will reduce quality of raws.

 

[hellangel9x]

after reading your advices carefully, I decide that I'll just ignore the pine needles. It seems time-consuming to do and I'm not even sure about how the result may turn out ...
thanks a lot! >3<

 

[Gradonil_Ral]

btw you should scan with 600 dpi for tank raws

You won't really see much (if any) improvement in quality when scanning at 600dpi instead of 300dpi. And scanning at 600dpi takes nearly twice the time 300dpi does. So I don't agree.
But I don't disagree either - scanning at 600dpi means higher page dimensions, usually with height of about 3200-3400px (IIRC). And you should always aim for your scans to be at least 3000px high (after cropping).

Some of the scanners (/software) will allow you to not only choose the dpi, but also the scale. I'm usually scanning raws at 300dpi with a scale of 140-150% - the result is almost the same (I can't tell a difference) as when scanning at 600dpi with a scale of 100%. Only it is much faster.

 

[Mana Light]

in my opinion, if you want to use topaz denoise (and...) to clean manga, almost manga scanned at 300 dpi are fine.
HOWEVER for some manga, if tone is small, i want to scan at 600 dpi to have clear tone (300 dpi looks lighter) to clean with topaz denoise (and...). and i see tone of that manga is small. much time for better raws.
if you only level raws to clean, 2000 px high like that page is fine.