File :-(, x, )
Anonymous
All right /hr/, I have a sort of problem/question regarding a doujin. It's not about what it is, where I can get it, or if there's a translation, though: What I want to know is what goes into cleaning a page of a big scan and smoothing it out, removing grain, normalizing colour, etc? What are some good rule-of-thumb filters and such? As it is right now, the resolution doesn't help it any: from the 1.908 MB 300ppi -quality 80 jpg source, the -quality 9 png is 15.8MB for this first grayscale page. Pic stupendously related.
>> Anonymous
All right, DDoS '08 is over; bump, because I'm still trying.
>> Anonymous
     File :-(, x)
>>392093

The denizens of this place-- the great majority of them, at any rate --are merely collectors. Few, if any, have the means, the skills, the temperament, or even the desire, to do more than look on the works that others have created. If your question is answered, it will be the grandest luck.
>> Anonymous
Getting rid of the crazy dots in a scan is what the Despeckle filter in Photoshop is for.
>> Anonymous
     File :-(, x)
I generally use gimp to clean up my scans, and the filter i tend to use is gaussian blur, adjusting the radius so it smooths things out a bit but doesn't destroy details.

That scan itself looks fairly bad though, key to all of this is preferably starting with a good scan. That one has signs of banding, there's alternating darker/lighter bands. Usually a sign of a bad scanner.

For this image, i changed it to grayscale, ran a Gaussian blur of radius 2.0, then adjusted the levels. Making the border solid black didn't seem quite right so i went with something a little short of that.
>> Anonymous
just to clarify, the black level I used was 63. fairly drastic. Preferably if you end up with something like that the scanners exposure settings need to be tweaked.

Auto level adjustment was going to use 77 which produced a darker image with higher contrast. Print rarely seems to be that dark.
>> Anonymous
>>392598
>>392600
TY, Anon, that's really helpful. Unfortunately, these seems to be the only raws of this one out on the internet, so that's what I'm stuck with. And good call on Gimp- it's great for image manipulation (hence the name). I'll see if I can't adapt some of those steps to IM, though, as it's fairly long (something like 70 pages...).

Thank you.
>> Anonymous
>>392093
Can I get a source on that? A rapidshare is fine too.
>> Anonymous
>>392822
My file is called Sachiel_-I-.rar
the rapidshit link on /rs/ seems to still be alive. Sachiel -II- (which I just found out exists, now) was up on Shitspace and appararently got caught in one of their DELETE FUCKING EVERYTHING sprees. God, those fucks make we want to punch a hamster...
>> Anonymous
>>392899
Thanks!

Well, one of the passwords on /rs/ was a link to the full manga.
http://mchan.miotd.com/dl/res/1251.html
>> Anonymous
Is that Eva + another anime?
>> Hiram K. Hackenbacker !!uabyFwZduK7
Oh hai, I scanned your images.
I know the filesize was horribly large, but my attempts to resize and drop the filesize caused the quality to plummet horribly. In addition, my scanner is terrible (an all-in-one printer-copier-thing), and as such has NO SETTINGS apart from resolution or greyscale/colour. The scans of the second volume are marginally better, but still pretty bad. If I ever get a decent scanner, I might re-scan the manga portions of the first two, along with the third volume I just received (plus a backlog ov various Front Mission and Kamen Rider books). No point re-scanning the artbook/text pages as nobody seems interesting in translating them.
>> Anonymous
>>393332
Far's I've been able to gather, it's a sort of reinterpretation of Eva with the Nanoha cast and a lot of GAR.
>>393318
Holy shit, I just ignored that as per my norm: Thank you! Actually...wait a minute...holy shit, this place is awesome. My hard drives are going to fill up really fast, now... :/
>> Anonymous
>>393578
Ah, well thanks for your hard work. I know that I, at least, am more interested in the artbook sections than the manga, actually-- that's sort of why I was trying to clean it up in the first place. And if I find the time, I would really like to read them all, too (though at this level, each page takes a good twenty-thirty minutes to understand. If I had a stylus-entry dictionary, it would make things much faster...)
>> Hiram K. Hackenbacker !!uabyFwZduK7
>>393587
I'd love to be able to read what's going on, even if the translations take a while. If I can't get a better scanner I'll try cleaning up the existing scans a bit, though it'll might take a while (damn that Real Life interrupting my work on the the internets!)
>> Anonymous
>>393578
Well one piece of advice for future scans, put a piece of black paper behind the page your scanning. Part of the problem with the scan is that the opposite page is showing a bit. putting the black paper behind will cut down on that.
>> Anonymous
>>392783
Yeah, GIMP has batch processing but its done via a scripting language that looks like a bitch to figure out.
>> Anonymous
>>393635
Oh it is. It is. Scripting GIMP is a pain in the ass. Supposedly it's Scheme, but it's weird, messed up Scheme. Supposedly they support Python, but that's hardly documented, despite being the "successor" "primary" scripting interface. Still leagues better than photoshop, but god damn... Though actually doing things is much harder than setting up. setup is as easy as compiling with the right options enabled.
>> Hiram K. Hackenbacker !!uabyFwZduK7
     File :-(, x)
I now have a much better scanner, Photoshop, and a guide to cleaning scans. Though I'll work through my unscanned stuff first before I rescan the first two volumes.
>> Anonymous
>>394033
Oh hawt. Better scanner is always a good thing. Out of curiosity, what page-size are these books anyway? Also, where did you get them and how much did they cost?
>> Hiram K. Hackenbacker !!uabyFwZduK7
>>394103
Got them from Toranoana via an escrow service. Can't remember the exact cost, but something in the region of £25 each in total. The books are 257mmx182mm, making them too big to do a double-page scan in one go on a standard A4 flatbed scanner.