Quicksandscans’ Dusting Guide

An introduction to “dusting” for beginners in manga scanlation and cleaning.

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Dusting Basics
   1. What is Dust?
   2. Finding Dust
   3. Goals
   4. Other Tools
3. Physical Scans
   1. Intro
   2. Leveling
   3. Dusting White
   4. Dusting Black
4. Digital and Public Raws
5. Compromises
6. Takeaways

Image used in this guide:

• Physical raw

1. Introduction

Dusting is the process of manually removing imperfections caused by the process of physically printing and scanning, specifically those that were not or cannot be removed by leveling or filtering.

When I started out, all anyone ever said on dusting was to “burn and dodge.” For someone who knew nothing, that didn’t help at all. Therefore, as requested by the head cleaner of Death Toll at the time, I wrote this guide on dusting and leveling for cleaner applicants. Filtering will not be demonstrated, but this guide will satisfactorily walk through the most basic and time consuming step of creating high quality cleans: dusting high quality tank scans. However, the concepts talked about here can be applied to cleaning physical raws generally.

2. Dusting Basics

2.1 What is Dust?

“Dust” (sometimes known as “dirt”) is a kind of noise present in almost all forms of raw manga. It’s usually spots of off-black on black areas, or spots of off-white on white areas. Getting rid of dust is important for the quality of scanlations, since it sets the difference between just okay and stunningly professional. A properly dusted scan will even decrease the size of files due to how image compression works.

2.2 Finding Dust

The two examples above are very obvious examples of dust, but when the pages are leveled and the dust is very subtle, you won’t see it.

If you can’t see the dust, one method is to zoom in, so the pixels where the dust is are much larger and are more easily seen. If you can see all the dust, you have a good eye!

Do you see the dust? If you’re still like me, you still don’t see it. Here’s a couple of dust specks circled:

The last method, but the most reliable, is to hyperlevel. Hyperleveling means leveling the image so that any pixel that isn’t white becomes black so it becomes really obvious where all the non-white pixels are. Input levels will be 253:1:255. (Leveling can be found in either Image >> Adjustments >> Levels, or Layers > New Adjustment Layer >Levels. I recommend you make an adjustment layer so you can toggle the hyperlevel layer on and off.)

So yes, there’s a TON of dust in the image. Veteran cleaners can see it immediately, but the majority of us can’t trust our eyes.

Here’s the same images, but with black dust. This adjustment layer has input levels at 0:1:2.

Though this guide does not go over them, there are a few other methods of hyperleveling and finding dust so that the naked eye can see it. They all work under the basic principle of overleveling, so use whatever works.

Though dust itself is frequently subtle, getting rid of the dust really does make the image look better. You’ll see with time…

2.3 Goals

The goal of dusting is to turn dirty black into true black and dirty white into true white after leveling the image. Details in the art that are very close in color to black or white are in the most danger of disappearing when attempting to level or dust. Therefore, the goal of dusting (and cleaning in general) is to remove the dust while preserving the original detail of the artwork. Most people should be naturally able to tell what is noise and what is art if they’re looking carefully.

2.4 Other Tools

There are other methods you have to consider that I don’t talk about here that can significantly help with dusting. For all these tools, you should apply them up until the point you start losing detail. Most are talked about elsewhere, but not all. Feel free to experiment.

• Curves
  • A more powerful version of leveling. Gives you more control over how colors are converted to other colors.
• Surface blur
  • A fast and basic blur. Used in physical scans when you want to remove paper grain. Used in digital raws to remove JPG artifacts.
• Smart Sharpen/Unsharp mask
  • Used to counteract blurred edges after surface blurring.
• Topaz filters
  • The most popular filter. Used to clean magazine scans (notorious for poor paper and print quality). Not necessary for good quality raws. Popular versions include Topaz clean 3, Topaz denoise 3, topaz clean 4, Topaz denoise 5. Also recommended is the new Topaz AI.
• waifu2x
  • Specially made for digital denoising. Good for low quality digital raws and upscaling low quality raws. Sometimes used just as a filter.
• Layer masks
  • A way to recover details. Powerful when you want filter distinct areas (for instance, areas with details and areas with lots of noise) differently.
• Frequency Separation
  • A rarely used technique that’s effective in dealing with very light or dark details while still preserving the screentone.
• Other filters
  • There are a bunch of other filters people use. If you know some, please pass the knowledge on to me 🙂 .

3. Physical Scans

3.1 Intro

Physical scans are scanned images of a physical manga volume or magazine that has been debound from the spine and the pages separated. These are used when either the digitals and/or public raws are not good enough quality or when the digital or public raws simply don’t exist. Digital raws are proliferating and some publishers are even starting to release high quality digitals, but the fact is, they still don’t cover everything.

Because of their characteristics, physical scans have more dust than digital scans. There are multiple reasons for dust in physical scans. The first is paper grain. The paper of a manga is not perfectly flat due to the bumps and valleys on the surface. These imperfections are amplified by the scanner light and become very apparent on an unmodified scan. Sometimes the paper itself has dark specks in the pulp. Another reason is the uneven distribution of black ink by the printer. Cheaper printing will leave white specks in areas that are supposed to be pure black. Finally, how the scanner handles the pages and the scanner could potentially also create dust. If the scanner does not regularly clean the scanning surface or lets dust or hair get on it, more dust will appear in the scans. The same will happen if they do not properly flatten the pages.

There are a couple other that affect the amount of dust in a physical scan. Remasters and reprints may be of higher quality than the normal first printing of a manga. Sometimes special anthologies will also be printed with better ink and paper. On the other hand, age will exacerbate issues with the quality of a scan. The paper and ink start breaking down, and older books may have been handled more.

Once you’ve deskewed, rotated, cropped, and maybe filtered your physical scans, you will be ready to first level, then dust them.

3.2 Leveling

Leveling will change the colors of a raw so that white is true white and black is true black. Always level before dusting. This section is a basic introduction to leveling.

To level the scans, first make a copy of your background layer, just in case. Then go to Image >> Adjustments >> Levels. To level the black areas, you want to drag the black arrow up until the point until the faint dark details, like the ones in his eyes, just barely start to disappear. This will most likely be just before the end of the inside of the peak closest to where the black arrow started on the histogram. To level the white areas, drag the white arrow up until the point where the faint light details, like where the screentone fades, just barely start to disappear. This will be just before the end of the inside of the peak closest to where the white arrow started on the histogram. then click OK.

Now you can dust your raws! Toggle the hyperlevel layers to see how much dust there is.

3.3 Dusting White

To dust white, select the dodge tool on your toolbar<> and change the range to highlights. 10 exposure is a good value to start off with. Use a round brush.

With the dodge tool, go over any dust that you see. You can use a hyperlayer to show where the dust is, but make sure you do not lighten any actual details or screentones too much.

Now his face is not covered with specks! Continue to dodge the whole image until all the areas that are supposed to be white are white. Adjust the dodge exposure and brush hardness as needed. The final result should look something like this:

Here’s a comparison of before and after, with a hyperlevel layer overlaid. Much cleaner!

Sometimes if a dark spot is so dark that the dodge tool takes forever to lighten it, you can use a white brush instead.

Always create a copy of the original layer so you can constantly check back and forth to see if you have accidentally lightened a detail or screentone you should not have.

3.4 Dusting Black

Dusting black is very similar to dusting white, except that black areas tend to have much more dust than white areas and it’s much harder to differentiate between dark details and small spots that are actually supposed to be true black.

Instead of the dodge tool, choose the burn tool instead. Change the range to shadows, and change the exposure to 10 as a starting value. The process of burning dark areas is the same as the process of dodging light areas, but with black and white swapped.

Here’s a sample of what it should look like:

If a light spot is too light, you can use a black brush instead. Again, always create a copy of the original layer so you can constantly check back and forth to see if you have accidentally burned out a detail or screentone. Sometimes there will be fuzzy white spots that are missed ink and should be black.

4. Digital and Public Raws

Digital scans are images extracted from ebook versions of manga put out by publishers. Typically these are created directly from the files that the publisher send to the printer, so they are much different from physical raws. Typically they only contain jpg artifacts, which is never handled by manual dusting. However, some digital raws and some public raws were created from physically scanning a book. If low quality enough, the cleaner will have to dust these.

5. Compromises

“But  I don’t want to spend a half an hour dusting a page!”

I won’t blame you, proper dusting takes a lot of time and patience. It’s very tempting to just overlevel, overfilter, or ignore some spare specks of dust, but know that if you end up working in groups with other scanlators, many of them want their cleaner to actually do a good job dusting. Plus, you should always strive to at least know how to clean properly before deciding which compromises you will make.

Taking too many shortcuts to get rid of dust will end up with a loss of detail. Too little dusting will leave dust in scans. Dust properly! …or not, I can’t force you to. Truth is, it’s near impossible to clean perfectly, and it’s extremely difficult and time consuming to clean well, so you’ll have to find your own point of compromise or go insane. That said, with practice you will speed up and learn what is important to you.

6. Takeaways

A few last points:

Unfortunately so far, no one has really managed to completely automate dusting to a level that satisfies everyone, and programs can’t really distinguish between really bad dust and detail as well as the human eye can. Cleaners who run magazines through many filters work magic, but that still requires experience and an expert eye. Someday maybe someone will figure something out (I hope).

The quality of some raws are so bad, that they’ll look awful no matter what you do to clean them. They’re all still dustable, but usually the effort is not worth the result. In other words, finding good quality raws will make dusting (and cleaning) easier.

Color images need to be handled much more differently and carefully. Tread carefully if you are a beginner.

Your other cleaning actions you do before or after dusting will significantly affect how easy or hard it is to dust the page. Experiment with filtering, curves, and levels to find something that works well for the raws you have. If you filter correctly, you will need minimal effort dusting to clean a page. Manually dusting is a last resort for experienced cleaners! That said, sometimes some hard manual scrubbing is what a scan will need. A good cleaner is one that knows what kind of tool is appropriate to use in what situation. That takes practice, so don’t get discouraged!

Updated February 2021