Translation process – part 2: Editing

Here's the second and final part to this series where I try to give an insight on what goes on "behind the scenes" as I translate something. The first part can be found here.

As a reference, here's the same flowchart as in the previous part:

Last time I covered the left scenario, and this time I'll go through the right one.

This part will also have more pictures because pictures are nice!

Part 2 - Editing tips and tricks

The only difference between this approach and the one described in part 1 is the fact that I'm taking care of the editing myself as I'm translating. Therefore, in order to spare you a lot of repetition, this part will focus on the actual editing, rather than the process.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended Version 12.0 when editing. The terms may differ, but no matter what program you use, most of these features should be available if it's a decent/professional program.

Layers

Layers are like those plastic sheets you might've seen during some "the making of" special of an old animation where they use it to draw on top of something without drawing on the actual background. The digitalized version more-or-less serve the same purpose. They're what allows you to move one piece of art or text without moving everything in the picture, or cover up parts of the background while leaving the original untouched.

Original + cover layer = cleaned frame!

The most basic use of layers when cleaning is a "cover" layer, where you paint over the original Japanese text in order to eventually add the English translation. Layers can easily be turned on and off, so this makes it easy to check the original typesetting to make sure your text has the same/similar size, style, placement, etc. If you regret covering some part of the background--like a heart or if you realize you've covered up part of the art close to the text--you can easily trim or delete the white blobs on the cover layer.

Tip: Turn off thumbnails!

Thumbnails show a small image of the content of the layer. This is utterly pointless when editing manga--and truth be told, I can't see why you'd ever use thumbnails--and changing from "small" thumbnails to no thumbnails will allow twice as many layers to be visible. Your scroll wheel will thank you!

How to: Right-click a thumbnail and select "No thumbnails from to popup menu.

Leveling

A scanned page often looks kinda washed out. The purpose of leveling is to make the black in a page black, the white white, without screwing too much with the grays in between. It's not hard, and even if it's not perfect, it usually makes a huge difference.

There are a lot of guides already out there, so you might as well check them out. The point I want to make here is that you should make an effort to clean up the pages. If you prefer, you can also use something called "curves" instead of levels.

Actions (Macros)

When editing manga, there are several procedures that are frequently repeated, such as changing fonts/colors, creating layers, or saving a page as a JPEG/PNG/etc.

Macros exists to deal with such tedious activities. A macro is basically a pre-recorded sequence of commands you can execute with a single key press. In Photoshop, macros are called actions, and can be accessed through "Windows" - "Actions."

These are the actions I use. I'll go through them all, listing the command sequence and explaining what they do. This is a long section, so if you're not interested, you can skip to the next: Redraws.

Save (Save - (Resize) - Save - Close)

This will save the Photoshop document as a PSD file in the current folder, save a JPEG version in an "[ENG]" sub-folder, and close the document. If you have several documents open, the close really speed things up since you'll be taken directly to the next one in line.

If you're working with huge source files, you can add a resize command before you create the JPEG. You'll have to add/remove this command when going from one manga to another.

This is probably the first action you would want to create. You will use it for every page, and it saves a ridiculous amount of time as the seconds start adding up.

Save PNG (Save - (Resize) - Export - Close)

This is the same as above, but it saves a PNG instead of a JPEG.

Redraw (Layer Via Copy - Set Current Layer - Select Layer "Background" - Hide current layer - Select layer "Redraw" - Select brush/clone stamp)

This will create a redraw layer. A redraw is when you can't just cover up the text with white paint, and need to redraw some of the art in the background that was covered by the Japanese text. You have to do this when the speech-bubbles are transparent or non-existing, or when the text goes outside the bubble. Unless you're a master with the brush tool, you need to make alternations to the background itself when doing this. At the same time, you don't want to do that to the actual background, so you want to copy parts of the background to a separate layer.

You first have to select the area you want to redraw with the lasso tool, and then run this action: it will copy the selected portion to a new layer, set the name of the layer to "Redraw," select the "Background" layer (the original raw file), hide it (so you know where the redraw layer starts and ends), select the newly created "Redraw" layer, and finally select the cleaning tool of your choice.

Now you can start redrawing, which will be covered in the next section.

Master macro (Convert Mode - Make layer - Set current layer - Make adjustment layer - Set current adjustment layer - Select layer "Cover" - Select brush - Set Foreground Color - Set Background Color - Set Actual Pixels menu item)

This is the action I run every time I start on a new page, and it does a lot of things:

It will first set the image mode to grayscale, because you want the page to be in black and white. Next it will create a new layer and name it "Cover," and add to it an adjustment levels layer named "Layers." If you want/can, you can set the levels in this step so it'll be the same for every page--note that the same settings usually doesn't work for every page though.

You will then select the "Cover" layer and the brush tool, and set the the colors of the brush to white/black so you can start covering up the Japanese text.

Finally, it will zoom in to 100% so you can see what you're doing--you can find this command through "View" - "Actual Pixels"

You have to remove/change the first command if you're working with color pages, or just do the rest manually for those pages if there's just a few of them. Of course, you can add/remove whatever you want to this sequence to fit you preferences. This is what you'll end up with after running this action:

Strokes 3/2px (Set Layer Style of current layer)

Will add a white stroke (outline) around everything on the selected layer. Typically, the layer will be a text layer where you want to distinguish the text from the background. The two variations will set the stroke thickness to 3/2 pixels.

Color Swap (Exchange Swatches)

Will set the foreground color to the background color, and vice versa. You will pretty much always use black or white, and I find it easier to use a hotkey rather than clicking the swap icon in the GUI.

Do stuff (? - ? - PROFIT!!!)

As the name implies, I use this for odd sequences I only need for a specific manga, and change it if I need to do something else. It's nice to have at times.

Heart/Note to the limit (Expand - Layer Via Copy - Set Layer Style of current layer - Set current layer - Select layer "Background")

Manga will often incorporated various symbols into the dialogue (♥, ♪, ★, ～,etc.). I prefer to use the original symbol, so this action will put it on its own layer.

I first select the the symbol on the "Background" layer with the Magic Wand Tool, which will select everything adjacent to where you click that also has the same color; i.e., clicking somewhere inside a black heart will select the whole heart. The action will then expand the selection with a few pixels, making sure it covers the whole symbol. The second half will copy the selection to a new layer, rename it "heart" (or whatever), and once again select the "Background" layer.

Because of the last command where it'll return focus to the "Background" layer, I can simply select - run action - select - run action until I've copied all the symbols I want.

If you don't understand why this is one of my favorite actions, please have a look at any Drill Jill chapter of your choice:

The heart has lost its status as a symbol of love to me

Font # (Set text style of current text layer)

This will simply change the current font. I have my four most used fonts hotkeyed.

I have ran out of hotkeys, but I'm pretty happy with my current set of actions. You should of course use whatever actions you find the most useful (mine or yours), but I would strongly recommend using some actions! I would guess my actions save a good 5-10 minutes for each chapter/doujin I do.

Redraws

Here's an example of an extreme redraw (in more than one way)

With the previous explanation and the above image, you should have an idea of what redraws are. They're pretty tough to deal with, but with the only real alternative being covering the text with an ugly box á la MSPaint, you don't have much choice.

Below I'll cover the three main tools I use when redrawing.

Clone Stamp Tool

The bread-and-butter tool for redrawing. It's like a brush where you select a source, and instead of a color, you'll paint whatever is at the source. This is why you want to copy a lot of the background when you create a redraw layer; you need something to use as the source for your cloning.

You probably want to turn off "Aligned Samples" in the options at the top. When turned off, the source won't change every time you release the mouse button so you can use the same source over and over again.
Brush Tool

Good brushwork is important! (Source: Choice! Vol.3 Ch.8)

Sometimes there's no place to use as a source for the cloning. In this case, you have to put all your trust into your own artistic talents!

If you can, I recommend reducing the sensitivity of your mouse so you can make more precise brush strokes. You might also want to try a really small brush size (1-2 px) with a gray-ish color and a 50-80% flow (kinda like opaque) if the original is a bit blurry; several low-flow strokes on top of each other can give a pretty authentic result.

Content-Aware Fill

Content-Aware Fill (CAF) was introduced in Photoshop CS5, and was the main reason I upgraded from my old CS3. CAF will examine the examine the image around a selection, and fill in the selection for you. Sounds too good to be true, and most of time, it is.

The problem is a black and white manga doesn't give Photoshop a whole lot to work with, and there's just too much guesswork going on when you leave it to the application. However, there are certain situations where CAF is still useful. Like when you have some text over a pattern/gradient background (preferably a lot of background), or after you've finished a major redraw, you can let CAF smooth out some uneven parts in the background. Also, lines are pretty much impossible to CAF, so don't bother.

Tip: Use the text to cover up sloppy redraws
- A.k.a. "it's only cheating if you get caught"
Redraws are hard. You literally have to use your imagination to fill in something that's not there. But because of that, you're not robbing the reader of anything that was originally there if you cover up parts of the redraws with your text. You often have to start at the edges and work your way towards the middle when redrawing, and the lines or patterns in the background rarely aligns where your redraws meet up. You have to place the text somewhere anyway, so you might as well use it to cover up the worst parts of your redraw! If needed, you can also add another pixel or two to the stroke thickness.

Typesetting

It's not always easy to fit left-right sentences using the Latin alphabet in speech-bubbles designed to contain logographical top-down sentences. Luckily, there are tons of parameters to play around with in the "Character" window that I think are often forgotten:

The values above are extremes just to make it clear what they do.

• Tracking changes the horizontal spacing between characters. If the text is slightly too wide, a -20 tracking usually does the trick without making the text looks squished together.


• A vertical scale of ~130% can make an oval bubble look more filled if you use horizontal text. I wouldn't recommend it for regular text, but I like it for exclamations like "Aah!"


• A baseline shift is an alternative to rotating the text. Use a combination of both for best result.
  
  
  
  • Bonus: A slight rotation can make a big difference; I pretty much rotate all the text in my translations to accommodate for the tilt of the speech-bubble or to indicate who's saying what.
  
  
  
  


• Don't be discouraged if you don't like a font's lower case characters. Mistral is a font I used a lot before, and I pretty much exclusively used the upper case characters.


• Enter can be used to force a line-break. Short exclamations (nooo, yeah, what, etc.) are usually fine even if you use a vertical layout. You can also "push down" words to the next line to make the text fit the shapes of the speech-bubbles (see the "rrrr" example above)


• Leading is like the vertical counterpart of tracking. Reducing the leading a bit--I don't know why, but typically a value lower than [font size -2]--can reduce the height just enough for it to fit inside a bubble.


• It's okay to paint outside the lines; add a stroke around the text and you should be fine.


• Use blank spaces (along with tracking) to to push a line to the right if you're dealing with a wonky bubble.

Q: But YQII-sensei, this looks stupid! M-Muh styleguides!
The go-to solution for a lot of people when facing a troublesome bubble is to reduce the font size. I've seen some completely unreadable tiny fonts in my days. I'm confident that keeping the size, but tampering with (for example) the leading is a much better solution; reducing the vertical spacing between rows by one pixel is not as drastic as reducing the size of each character by one pixel.

Tip: Pixels > Points

Under "Edit" - "Preferences" - "Units & Rulers," you can change the units to pixels. I don't know what else it does, but it allows you to specify font size in pixels. This means you can use a 20±5 px font size for pretty much every ~x1600 scans. Before I changed this, I sometimes had to use a size of 43 in one manga, and 4.3 in the next. Pixels are obviously pixels, but I don't really know what "points" use as a reference, but the inconsistencies really pissed me off.

Tip 2: Bold is not enough? Strokes can fix everything!

If you make some text bold, it'll always be a fixed thickness added to the characters. Sometimes you want really thick text--e.g., when you use a very big font size--you can add a black stroke around the text. A 1 px stroke is already thicker than bold, and you can increase it until you're satisfied.

One final though on time management

If you have someone else doing the proofreading, it means you'll have to wait for them to go through the dialogue once you're done with the editing. During this time, there's nothing for you to do unless you move on to a new project.

When I edit something, I don't do any redraws, copy/align hearts, or any super fancy typesetting (like a scream where I work on individual letters) before I send it to be proofread. The proofreader only needs the text, and this way I can get it to him as soon as possible. While I wait for him to go through the dialogue, I can work on the final touches. Much like a lot of the things brought up in part 1, this sort of simultaneous work leaves me with a lot of leeway.

Of course, if you want someone to QC the editing, you have to finish it first. Still, if you have a rough edit, you might as well have it proofread now--that way you'll only have the QC left once you're done with the editing.

Wrap up

This was a really long post, so if you've gotten this far, cheers.

I tried to focus on some less common topics in this "guide." This is why the leveling section was very brief, and I didn't mention things like bold text during the typesetting section. As the title says, I wanted to make a collection of tips and tricks rather than create yet another "Editing 101" guide.

If you read this as someone completely unfamiliar with manga edits, I hope you liked this insight in an unknown line of work. And if you're an editor, I hope it had some sort of impact on you. I do these things because I think they affects the result in a positive way, so even if I just got you thinking "Hm... Maybe...," I've accomplished something （´3`）ノ

Whatever the case, I hope you found this interesting in some way!

End of part 2

Well, that was probably the longest post I've ever written. One of the reasons I put off writing this guide for such a long time is because I knew I had a lot I wanted to write. I didn't plan to, but I ended up writing the whole thing in one sitting. My brain's kinda fried now, so I think things got a bit messy towards the end...

Either way! With this out of the way, that's one less thing on my to-do list. Guess I'll go do some editing...

By the way, if you read through this while trying to spot some April Fools' Day joke, I'm sorry to tell you that there isn't one. Although, if you read 3000+ words expecting one, I guess that's sorta a prank in itself.