If only cleaners are considered a profession I guess I could be one of them ^^. But too bad it was a voluntary job which means you gain nothing from doing the job, but for sure there are lots of photoshop newbies who wanted to learn how to clean a manga and contribute some of their free time.

On this tutorial I will share my simple technique on pulling the artwork out from those manga scans to be able to re-use them for scanlations .

Cleaning those scans is easy and will only take you 3-6 mins per page, 10-20 mins if the scans are ugly. (I'll be honest with that coz I did search for the ugliest scans ever and try to clean it, and still the final output is ugly.)

I did apply for a cleaner from one of the outstanding scanlations and I did pass their exams, then I back out after that ^^. It was out of curiosity. (it was way back a year ago)

Ok let me show you how to clean manga scans properly.

First of all download a sample of manga scans/RAW on mangahelpers.com.

for this tutorial I'm going to use naruto's last 2 pages of chapter 437.

Open up page 16 on photoshop, then grab your crop tool [C] and expand the whole page, it doesn't matter if you expand it too much, its better than too short.

Then open your page 17 and combine the two of them.

Then select the layer where the page 17 resides, grab your marquee tool and delete the excess part of the pages, do the same on page 16.

Surely you would come up with a visible cut between them, so your goal is to blend them perfectly by using the clone stamp tool.

Make sure you make a new layer before you do your cloning stuff, never embed your clone on the original coz it's no turning back. When you are cloning from another layer make sure to check the ‘sample all layers' option.

After doing the cloning stuff, merge them. its time for us to pull out those Art and embed it to another paper ^^, yes we don't want the grayish background so we need to pull out those artwork using my favorite masking partner, go to select >color range.

And select the color you wanted to pull out and that would be any kind of black ink.

After you press Ok, mask it, for more info about color range and masking you can read my previews article here, when you are done masking you will be having a transparent background, at this point we have already done pulling out the artwork all you need to do is add new layer underneath and filled it with white.

then you can add curve adjustment, to make the art darker.

Time for removing those Japanese scripts , select your mask [Alt Click], then grab your brush tool reset your palette [D] and press [X] to swap your fore ground and background palette.

Then paint it using your brush tool to mask the area.

Then select the artwork and add some fresh effects by adding drop shadows and inner shadows, the drop shadows must have less than 20 opacity, zero distance, zero spread and 3 to 5 size, the inner shadows must have 49 or less opacity, 5 distance, zero choke and 5 size.

If there are some unnecessary noise on the final output just select the mask and go to filter > noise > dust and scratches to fix them.

I made a video for this tutorial, this video has not been sped up, it was my actual speed for using photoshop and my first time using adobe premiere so please bear with me I'm a complete beginner, watch my video on how to to clean up manga here ^^.

I'm a big fan of naruto so please if you appreciate their manga please purchase an original copy if they are available at your area.