Scanlation Quality Ratings
I realized that I’ve been flinging terms like HQ and MQ around pretty casually, so I wanted to clarify what I mean by them: High Quality, Medium Quality, and Low Quality.
Now I’m not here to argue what’s better, so I will try to present this in a unbiased manner.
There are two main types of raws: magazine scans and tankoubon. Magazines are usually lower quality due to cheap paper and ink. Tankoubons are bound volumes (books) usually consisting of several chapters. These are high quality.
Also, take into consideration the scanning resolution of the raw. Some pages are scanned at normal size and resolution (~800 px x 1200 px at 72 dpi [dots per inch]) while others are ~2500 px x 3000 px at 300 dpi. Obviously, the latter is higher resolution and will usually produce a better clean. The very bottom of this totem pole are photos taken of the raw using a digital camera.
It seems everyone has different opinions of what HQ should consist of, so instead I’ll list the points you should look for in a scanlation and you can decide how to rank things yourself.
These are listed in order of base criteria. Lower quality will only meet the first couple points while higher quality will meet them all.
- Pages are white (not yellow, pink, or gray)
- Edges of the page are not visible (no black lines around edges of page)
- Japanese text is fully removed (not just written over in English)
- Page is properly leveled (not overleveled)
- Black areas are fully black
- White areas are fully white
- Borders are redrawn
- Line art is clear and unbroken (not blurry)
- Gray areas are uniformly solid or patterned (not blurry or distorted)
- Text outside of bubbles has been removed and the picture redrawn
- White line art and details are redrawn if needed
Of course there are many degrees of meeting these criteria. Black areas can be mostly black or gray areas can be fixed up but not redrawn.
A new phenomenon in the scanlating world is the use of denoise programs like Neat Image and Topaz Vivacity. These will get the job done quicky but the quality varies greatly between groups and individuals. There are some very skilled denoisers out there (and they’re getting better every week). There are also many many people who don’t know what they’re doing and put out very LQ work. Speed scanners almost always use a denoise program or plug-in and produce admittedly LQ or LQ/MQ cleans (though a few groups have been putting out solid MQ.) The benefit is that a chapter can be speed scanned in hours by only a handful of people as opposed to HQ groups which require several dedicated cleaners and up to a week.
Anyway, I thought it might be good to give examples of different groups and different styles. Here is the same page done by as many groups as I could find, but I’ll keep the pages anonymous so you can browse without any bias. Again, this is not to say what is better or worse since every style has its strengths and weaknesses. This is merely to demonstrate the wide variety of techniques out there.
[spoiler]
If you recognize one of these pages as your own and you’d like it removed, please just let me know.
[/spoiler]
I hope this helps to clarify how scanlations are rated. As a member of an HQ Bleach group, it really really really kills me to see a LQ/MQ scan called High Quality (usually by the readers, not by the scanlators).
I searched for \’Ouran Host Club\’ in google and found this your post (\’Scanlation Quality Ratings\’) in search results. Not very relevant result, but still interesting to read.
Hah, that’s really funny!
Anyway, Puri-Puri Neko does really nice quality Ouran scanlations. They’re not up-to-date with the most recent releases, but that means they can use tank raws for their scans.
Your tutorials are very helpful. Thank you!
Sorry, for the question but … what’s name font of Mayuri and Szayel in M7?
Szayel is Eager Naturalist, and Mayuri is Teabeer Custom ;)
seriously, youre scan quality is amazing lol it must take a long time to do each page of a chapter even with help from others
LOL thanks for the compliment! Bleach pages usually take 2-3 hours for me, though it largely depends on the page. Having a big team of cleaners working on each chapter is the only way to do HQ, IMHO ;)
oh wow..After seeing the comparison…I’m speechless O_O Truly, you have help me and show me the light xD After seeing the differences, I’ve realised the horrible truth..my first assigned job is hideous Dx I’ve got a long road to travel in order to improve my skill…I’m sure this site will help me a LOT..Thank you~
For the scanlation did M7 just pick a series that is not yet produce in HQ or is it depends on the difficulty of the manga pages itself?
Maximum7 began as a merging of the Bleach7 site and the MaximumT (Trigun) group. You’ll have to ask around in the IRC channel for more details because embarrassingly enough, I don’t know much more!
I’ve been wondering are those HQ criteria that you point out are specifically for Bleach?The reason I ask this is because there are some manga out there that is very hard to clean to HQ level,especially redrawing complex gray areas(for bad quality gray).
Sorry if I’ve been asking too much. :)
I’m just wondering how is it possible to know if a page is over-leveled?
This is the million dollar questions XD Unfortunately, there isn’t a measurement or hard number that will let you know when you’re over-leveled. It’s something you’ll have to develop an eye for. My suggestion is to make a few duplicates of your raw and level them all differently and then compare. Over-leveled pages will have jagged line art and thin lines because all the gray anti-aliasing has been removed ;)
Hello ~
Sorry to bother you, but I’d like to show me how to clean raws and leave them in HQ. Then leave my email for you to contact me. Thank you very much in advance for all these tutorials. But I ask you to show me in a ‘custom’ because you may have doubts or questions as you learn. I am also part of a group of scanlations of English and Spanish.