Manga Cleaning Fundamentals: Levels, Despeckle & Screentones

### Getting Started with Manga Cleaning Cleaning is the foundation of scanlation quality. As a cleaner, your mission is to take raw scans—often yellowed, compressed, or noisy—and convert them into crisp, printer-quality black-and-white plates. #### 1. Levels & Curves Adjustment Always adjust your black and white points non-destructively using an Adjustment Layer. Avoid clipping midtones or destroying screentones. #### 2. Denoising without Blurring Never use heavy Gaussian Blur. Use smart despeckling or neural dust filters to preserve fine cross-hatching. #### 3. Preserving Speech Bubble Boundaries Ensure bubble outlines remain intact. Leave clean white interior canvas for the typesetter.