Straightening and Cloning

One last tutorial before we start. The page used for this tutorial is page 23 from volume 9:

Not needed, but here's the Chuang Yi page anyways:

Straightening

Now, if you have read through the raws, you may have noticed that the not-so-diligent scanner didn't straighten the pages. We'll have to do that for ourselves.

This method isn't recommended for proper raws (like, raws I've scanned myself) because it changes the canvas size. However, the difference is only visible to people with OCD, like me, so it's worth the efficiency. If you do end up doing cleaning and editing in the future, the normal way is just to rotate and proportionally scale the image; nevertheless, this way is pretty much instant compared to the normal way.

Open up PS and right-click the eyedropper tool (I). Select the ruler tool:

Draw a ruler vertically or horizontally, it doesn't matter. Stick as close to the line you choose as your reference as much as possible. You may have to disable Snap under View -> Snap (Shift+Ctrl+;).

Press the "Straighten" button on the second button from the top, then it should rotate and crop the page for you. If it doesn't look right, try again using a different edge.

Cloning

Now, sometimes, there might be text that are in places that you can't just paint over. Take, for example, this text bubble in the flashback. I would actually accept the page if you don't do it at all, since it's not very significant, but if you have enough free time, you could try cloning it.

Since we're going to do work on the background, I would recommend that you clone the layer first.

This guide by the immortal scanlation group Storm In Heaven pretty much covers it all, so I'm not going to repeat them. Select the clone stamping tool (S), then where you want to clone while pressing down the Alt key. The brush works exactly like a normal brush, except that it copies over the image from where you selected. The location of where you copy from moves along with your brush.

I recommend that you choose from just left of where the text in the flashback bubble clips into the larger bubble for the flashback (red rectangle). Starting from the green rectangle, work your way up. Don't be afraid to choose new sources for clone stamping.

Eventually you'll clean all of it:

And now you can clean and typeset like normal:


New to Photoshop CS5 is a feature called content-aware fill. It only really works well in certain cases. You can try it out, but good ol' clone stamp is good enough.



When to Clone Stamp

Don't do clone stamp every single time. For example, the title on the page used for Typesetting 101 would've taken me 15-30 minutes to clean. Use your judgment to decide whether to put the translation next to it or clean it with clone stamp.

Merging Spreads

One final point I would like to make is about 2-page spreads. As of right now, don't merge them yourselves. Just treat the two pages separately. I'll merge them after you submit your chapter to me.

Final Test

Alright, take a shot at this final test (page 31). Straighten and clean the broadcast sign, then typeset it.

In regards to styling, use the font Champagne & Limousines (because it's a narrow font, it can fit better inside the vertically-orientated box) for labels that display the location, italicized WildWords for announcement text, and Syntax LT for the broadcast sign. All of them should have been included in the font pack. I should have the styling guideline hammered out before we start so that our releases can be more or less consistent:

Typesetting 101

Let's start, shall we? The most common task you, as a member of the Pokemon Special Restoration Project will be performing is typesetting. It's the act of putting the text on the page.

All of the fonts for this project can be downloaded here.

The page I'll be using for this tutorial is page 6 of volume 9:

Chuang Yi's translation:
Let's open the Japanese raw up in Photoshop (CS5 in my case). Your layout may be different; I find this layout to suit me the best, but you can try different ones. Nevertheless, I recommend that you at least have the Layers, Character and Styles tabs.

Start by adding a new layer (second button from the bottom right on the Layers tab). You'll keep the original layer as is, and add white regions over it to cover the Japanese text up. Use the rectangle tool (M) or the lasso tool (L) to select the area, then use the paint bucket tool (G; you'll have to change it to the paint bucket from the gradient tool manually) to make the selected area white:

It should look like this in the end:


Switch over to the text tool (T) and start making text bubbles (well, rectangles). For now, just set the font to good ol' WildWords and the font size to 14px.

Notice how I match up the text to the crosshair at the center of the bubble to center the text. While that does a pretty good estimate, you might have to also move the whole text layer around (V) to make it look correctly aligned. Use your judgment:

Keep on copying over the text. You might have to break the line (i.e. between "you've" and got") to keep the text from going out of bounds:


The final product for now. Note that in the bottom two text bubbles, the tildes (~) look weird. That's because WildWords doesn't support tildes, so Photoshop inserts the tilde with its default font. Therefore, type out the whole text without the tilde ("AAAH!!"), then go back and insert the tilde:

It looks...dead. We'll have to spice the typesetting up. The most common convention is by making the loud or shouting text, usually in spiky text bubbles into Bold Italic:

Hmm, still doesn't cut it. Let's also make the text larger. I changed the font size for the shouting to 24:

The text now clips into the surrounding area, but that's okay. Go to Layer -> Layer Style -> Outer Glow. Set the settings like below. The text will still go out of bounds, but it's legible. Some people don't let the text go out of bounds at all; it's just my opinion that this looks better. However, don't spam this style too much, especially for normal dialogue unless the text bubble is just too small.

It would take too much work to do this for every single time the text clips out, so save the style using the "New Style..." button. It should appear in the Styles tab.

Something is still missing, though. It's not very clear in this page, but the Masked Man's voice uses a different font. Thus, we need to change the font as well. The default font for evil voices is "Manga Temple":


Once you switch the text over to Manga Temple, however, you might notice that the styling is turned back to normal. That's because Manga Temple doesn't have a Bold Italic option by default. However, if you go into the Character tab, you can force the font to be turned into bold and italic with their corresponding buttons:

Now, our page is finished. Well, I inserted the title "Vs. Ariados" afterward, but it's just another text bubble with Outer Glow. The font for that kind of "sign" is Syntax LT.

For this project, don't worry about removing the Japanese text such as titles and sound effects if it's just too embedded into the page. We don't have an army of editors and cleaners to do that. If you really want to do so, you could put the sound effects in the margins.

Now, try it for yourself on page 7, and post your results in the comments: