Scanning Skewed Scans Driving Me Crazy

[mantis2020]

I'm just hoping I'm not alone here. This has always been a problem for me, and I recently got a pretty good Epson Perfection scanner. It works great and my scans look good, but they're always a little bit skewed. It could be a really small number, like a tenth of a degree. But so long as it's off-balance even just by that, if you're someone who pays attention to fine details in their scans (or maybe I take it a bit too far) it'll stick out like a sore thumb. I'm very delicate when I place my pages and lower the lid slowly so it stays in place. Still happens.

I scan at 1200dpi and scale it down to 600dpi. Scans turn out quite nicely that way. Sometimes I have to correct the skew manually by comparing the scan against a ruler or something for that purpose. I can rotate it so it aligns with that. Sometimes I need to rebuild a few small parts of the page due to the rotation, usually pretty easy. But what drives me crazier is when I align one part of the page fine, but then I find out the skew isn't correct at another part.

It's as if many of the panels on the page are lopsided. For the life of me I can't imagine why this would be so. Also happens with text, so I'm not sure where I'm going wrong.

In this case (scan I did the other day) it appears that the panels weren't supposed to be precisely aligned (or the mangaka did it quite lazily) so it doesn't matter so much:


If you look at this one, you can tell that the text and the bottom picture are way off:


I'd rather deal with this problem preemptively, before I end up scanning and editing a full doujinshi and then seeing how off-balance it is.

 

[Gradonil_Ral]

Considering that mangakas draw the panels by hand, it's not strange that we get a lot of slanted lines. Only some of them were meant to be aslant in the first place.
If you look closely, even some "straight" lines can be bent a little in the middle - even if the artist did* use a ruler and a triangle to make a panels outline, I'm not sure if they use them when inking too.

Slanted pages, however, are usually the result of printing mistakes. Professional printing press might be less likely to slant the pages during print than your usual office printer would, but it still happens.
I'm always rotating the pages after scanning them. To be more precise: I scan the pages (two at a time to save time), then I separate, rotate (using ruler in PS) and crop them. Sometimes I rebuild parts of the pictures that rotation caused too.

~~
Murata Yuuske used to have a ustream account, but it doesn't seem active anymore and archive with thousands of hours of him drawing seem to be gone too...
But you can find some of his streams on youtube, if you want.

*If you look for a bit, you'll find him drawing panels with a lone ruler, sometimes starting in the middle of the page...

So precise angles are not a priority for them.

~~
As for the 2nd picture... The text shouldn't be in the same line as the bottom panel.
Just imagine a panel around the text - it would be in the same line, leaving some space from its border for the text inside.