Okay so now that you have some of the basics under your belt it's time to start getting more advanced. Some mangas like Naruto, replace 'tone' with gray.. This is part of what makes it a HQ release. Since scanned magazine manga is not as clean as scanned tankuban manga there is more work you have to do to make it look good. Doing the grays well can help you stand out in the crowd as an editor/cleaner. I'm gonna say straight up that you have to be more precise with this than most anything else you do or your pages are gonna look like garbage. No joke you should see my first pages where I tried to learn how to do the grays
Like most anything with drawing, practice will improve your skills. I learned by doing it with some brief instructions. By doing it I mean taking raws and practicing on them. These first pages I worked on were never gonna see the light of day as a release. By practicing like this without 'reward' you also show your dedication as an editor and this speaks volumes to scanlation groups when they are considering you for a position. All in all learning the grays isn't very difficult as much as it is time consuming. Again precision is the key word here you have to work slow and make sure that you don't over trace.
Okay now that the lecture is over lets get down to learning...
First thing you need to do is make a copy of the background as a layer (CTRL + J). Next you make a new layer *not a copy just a layer* (SHIFT + CTRL + N). Or click layer -> New -> Layer. Close the eyeball on the background layer to turn off that layer and then select the background copy layer and adjust the opacity to around 75%. With the new layer selected zoom in close to the area you need to make gray. (I am zoomed in far enough that the 2px brush looks like a circle instead of a square.) Using a 1px brush trace every single line in the frame that borders an area that needs to be gray. Or you can use the line tool set to 1 px. The line tool can save you a lot of time but you do need to be careful of getting to blocky or angled in your lines when going around curves. Make sure that your line tool is set up to to fill pixels and not make a new layer for this.
If you draw off the line while tracing with the brush tool (B) you can use the eraser tool (E) to erase the part that went over and start tracing again from the point you left off. This saves a lot of aggravation if you have been carefully drawing a really long and squiggly line for the last 2 minutes and suddenly near the end go off the line, you don't have to step back (CRTL + Z) and lose all your 2 minutes of work just erase (E) that little bit and start up again where you left off.
Below is an image with the areas that need to be made gray circled for you.
Below is an image that shows the beginnings of the tracing process close up. Notice that the I am working in very close here. Occasionally zoom out to make sure you haven't missed a spot or two. Also you can see that with the background turned off and the background copy set 75% opacity I can see the lines that I am tracing and also I can tell were I have already traced.
Here is the work once the tracing is complete.
In this next example I show you what the new layer looks like with background copy layer and background layer turned off.
I look at this to make sure that I didn't miss a spot. You can also adjust the opacity on the background copy layer to a lower level if you want to see how well you did.
Now that you have your tracing done and are satisfied that it looks good you get to fill in the grays.. If you have a fairly simple area to fill without broken lines then you can use the bucket tool (G). If you use the bucket make sure that the color is even all through the gray parts. You still might have to go over parts of it with the brush.
You need to set your foreground color to gray the best way to do this is... set the color to d7d7d7 which is the new shade we use different from the one shown below. This will set the values of red, blue, and green each to 215. Click ok and your good to go. The new shade of gray will be lighter then what is shown here.
To use the bucket tool (G) just hover the mouse over the area that you want to fill with gray and click. Sometimes you will have to click a few times to fill the area. Be careful of it bleeding over and make sure you clean up the bleed overs. Also since it doesn't always cover uniformly make sure that you go over it with the brush tool (B) where it needs it. Alternately you can use the brush tool (B) at whatever px you need to fill the area. Use a smaller pix around the areas that are traced so that you don't "color out of the lines". (Yeah yeah I know we are not in kindergarten anymore.) Then "mow" the big areas with a bigger pixel brush to fill in the gray
Now just go back over the frames and clean up any bleed overs or missed spots. If you look closely you can see a spot of gray between the thumb and first finger that has a touch of gray outside the lines.
And here is the completed section of page...
This was a fairly simple one to do believe me they can get way more complicated than this and it takes a lot of time. This one took me about a half hour. Patience is important. If you rush this process then you will have a page that doesn't look good at all.
Here is an example of one that took me two hours just to show something more complex. Also notice that I had to trace around the big black text with white since there was white border around it in the original.
And there you have it the basics of doing the grays so that you don't get the blues...