Graphics Questions? Ask me Anything~

Sweet. Thanks

Hello :D
What are your primary choice of fonts?

and another question, what are your favourite genres?

My favorite genre is vanilla, so I make all the guys groan with that because they don't always want to do vanilla. I'll be groaning when I have to do some NTR and darker stuff :P

Primary fonts are CCWild Words and SF Grunge Sans. We have some others but those are the two primaries.

Vanilla is the dream!! I also dislike working on the darker stuff :( e.x. working on Caged Hawk made me a bit sad, mostly because everyone in it was a horrible person haha

ahh I see, I use Zud Juice for my standard font, but I'm just trying to change it up to get out of my comfort zone.

We spent a lot of time deciding what font to go with and did a comparison of just about every main body font you can think of with comic fonts. In the end though it was decided Wild Words.

I see, thank you for your hard work :)

I'd love to try apply for QC or Proofreader, one day.

Albeit I can't see the larger type of group happening on Fakku.

Do you have any tips on learning Illustrator and InDesign, especially the latter? I have experience editing h-manga in Photoshop, but not so much the previous two. I'm currently doing some experimenting with some of my past projects, and I know the basics of using the two programs, but I'm wondering if you have any advice on things to focus on if I were to learn Illustrator and InDesign for working at FAKKU as an editor. Thanks!

The thing I would keep in mind with learning additional adobe programs is that they're meant to work together, but none of them operate the same way. Don't limit yourself by leaning on a crutch to do a certain task in Photoshop just because you know it better than you do in Illustrator or InDesign. Chances are the method isn't as efficient or exactly as you would have wanted it. However, if you're not familiar with any type of graphic design experience you'll have the hardest time with Illustrator. It's a bit of a beast, and it's a powerful beast, but once you understand it you have a lot of power in your hands of designing vectors.

Even when I work, I find myself stumbling across something new and all I do is Google the answer. Even if it's something simple as "How do I draw inside text in Illustrator" you'll get a pretty quick response of a how-to explanation. 99.9% that does the trick.

If you're willing to invest a little money, subscriptions from Lynda.com are great tutorials, TutsPlus has some really nice Illustrator ones that you can get your hands on. Also, if you're a uni student, you could see if you qualify for Adobe CC being $19.99 a month... you get access to all of Adobe's programs, fonts, and tutorial videos which are extremely helpful.

Just use the programs for what they're designed to do. :)
Clean your pages in Photoshop
Make your nice sfx and stylized text with patterns, titles, etc in Illustrator
Place all those items in InDesign and lay them out nicely and typeset in InDesign using Style sheets (learn those, that's vital for typesetting. They'll save you a ton of time.)

editing question:

now that the pages are already coming in pristine and beautiful, and I notice in the samples that sfx aren't being replaced, but rather subbed (which i think looks really cool so you can enjoy more of the original artists efforts), ie:



so my questions is, it seems like there's not too much leveling or cleaning or redrawing or decen required, so what is your editing focus working on these books, compared to traditional scans? what type of extra processes are necessary for preparing them for printed publication over digital releases?

I"m probably going to give you a longer answer than you wanted, because it was a really good question lol

Regarding the SFX:



I actually missed this first part the first time I responded. I'm unsure if I misunderstand your statement, but even though we have digital files, all sfx are hand drawn and are not separate layers for me to simply remove. If I were to remove all the sfx it'd require a massive amount of redrawing.

We actually went through a LOT of thought process on how we wanted to do our sfx. Initially we weren't even focusing sfx, because it literally doubles the work load for an editor and translator. But we all were looking at other publishers and we came to a realization that every-single-publisher-ever does at least something with sfx in manga. So then it became more of a 'okay, so how do we want ours to look?'

Something that is kind of consistent with all manga available on the shelf in your bookstore is that the sfx are kind of an after-thought. They're usually very basic text subtitling the sfx just so you know what's going on. Some translate them to the English equivalent, where others use the romanji form. YQII could go into huge detail on his process with SFX and how to approach words that just don't have English equivalents.

But something no publisher does to a good extent is give sfx a special treatment like they're given in Japanese. They're huge and stylized, given screen tones and effects and really are part of the art. Where they're just treated as subtitles here, so I try to put a lot of focus on them and give them a similar look to what they have in Japanese.

What I focus on differently in professional editing/scanlation:

I would say the biggest thing that I no longer worry about is leveling of any kind. No page treatment, no alteration to colors.

There's a couple reasons for this:
1. We have digital copies, so it's not scanned and colors aren't altered
2. This is a big one too, manga is literally a true 100% black and white page. There are no gray tones, instead halftones are used.

Halftones are probably one of the biggest focus I have in editing, they're extremely important because they create an illusion when printed.



Black and white manga pages are literally solid black lines and dots. So while that makes it so I no longer need to worry about leveling the page, it also means I must pay attention to recreating halftones or editing them (perhaps redrawing handwritten text on a bubble) because if I don't accurately recreate the halftone, it'll create a smudge and the illusion when printed will be apparent because the halftone doesn't flow 100%

An example of this would be:


I ended up recreating the entire half tone inside the bubble, because I found that to be easier and more accurate than trying to clone stamp it. The last thing I want is for a bubble to look botchy when printed, and when you have clear dots like that it's a lot more unforgiving than in scanlation where the halftones are already blended together so to speak. But besides the half tone in the bubble, I also have to pay attention to all the halftones outside of the bubble as well and make sure I clone stamp very accurately.


Another thing I focus more on are titles for chapters, but I think that's partially me just flexing my graphic design experience since my scanlation days. I really like to give titles special treatment since they are given so much in the original. However I try to make it very close to the original and pretty much identical to allow English readers to enjoy the stylization it was originally meant to be in. Luckily they're almost always available in an illustrator format, so I get to cheat and look at all their layers and what they did and mirror it. After that it just becomes a 'how do I make it look nice like that in English?'

Other then that, my biggest challenge I think is typsetting so far. Mike is the art director and he has a real vision and passion for how he wants things. Up until now I've had my own scanlation team, pretty much my own terms for editing in project-h where I've never had to change my style. Granted, looking back I can see I had lots of improvements I could have made especially since I'm more educated now on typography. But I have a bit of a curve where I need to change my style to Fakku's style and it's been hit or miss lol I'm pretty sure I made Mike pull his hair a few times in the beginning, but I'd like to think I'm improving a bit on that front.

P.S. I got side tracked and forgot to answer your other question the difference between preparing for print and preparing for a digital release.

Since everything is in InDesign, it's just a matter of exporting it in different formats. With a printer I'd just send a PDF to them of the pages with the crop lines, bleed lines, and any notes in the slug for the print shop. That's pretty standard when sending anything to a printer.

For you guys I honestly don't know what formath or anything you'll be having yet for digital releases. I know Jake is working on some site stuff and when he's ready all it'll be a matter of me doing is exporting it to whatever format he wants and I can always do a batch resize if necessary.

Thanks for your reply, Ziggy. Is your use of Illustrator basically limited to sfx and highly stylized text, then? I imagine smaller hand-drawn moans might be easier in InDesign or Photoshop.

Also, how do you handle exporting from InDesign? I was about ready to send my first InDesign project to QC, but it seems that jpg and png exporting from InDesign is VERY basic. There's no options for number of colors, most importantly. It's giving me 3+ MB, 256 color pngs for x3000 images, when they'd ideally be ~1 MB, 16-32 colors.

Speaking of which, what dimensions will digital releases have? I hear tell that you're working with x10000 raws, will they be resized?

Yeah, Illustrator I stick with highly stylized SFX and moans. I also use it specifically for all the titles in the chapters.

I've actually come to learn recently that InDesign is kind of clunky for digital images. I've been a little frustrated with that as well. If some guru with more knowledge than me has any info I'd love to hear it but so far my research has come up with nil.

To answer your question, yes we will be resizing them to make them manageable for people to download and view. What you may want to do is open the actions panel in Photoshop and create a new actions folder and action, hit 'record', and do the following:
Open one image from folder / (ctrl + alt + i)to resize what you need / save it / close it / stop the recording.

Then go into File / Automate / Batch

Select your folder in your set, your action you made should be visible in actions.

Select your exported folder in your source, check mark override action "open" commands". Select your destination as "None" if you don't want to bother with renaming any of the files and hit okay and it'll start to run.

If you do want to rename your files too, select folder in your destination, choose your same folder, (or if you want to play it safe, choose a new folder)and you can choose how you want to override the naming for the files below.

Check mark the "Override Action "Save As" Commands if you do that.

This is what I used to do in scanlation days with Photoshop to batch rename stuff or to resize files without individually having to go through and manually doing it myself.

It can be a little tricky, but ultimately it's a time saver.

----

It's kind of clunky, but it's the best method I can come up so far on managing your JPGs... I'd imagine it's easier to work with on Photoshop since that's actually what the program is designed to do with photo format images. InDesign works a lot with PDF's and EPS files meant to go to a printer. It's a layout program specifically which is why it's fantastic for print.

If you have any problems with figuring out your actions, feel free to PM me and I can try to work with you in more detail. I'm looking at it in CC and I know it's a bit different than CS6.

haha, no, that is just the kind of detail i was hoping you'd use. thanks, i really appreciate the depth of your response. i hadn't thought of it, but that sounds a bit like a double edged sword- getting the pages in super clean, so clean in fact, your editing is THAT much more noticeable.. redrawing half-tones can be a real headache already. Still though, no bleed or level issues totally outweighs that lol.

Out of curiosity, have you ever used your own handwriting, via touchpad/stylus, to mimic fonts you cannot match? that seems like it would be a lot of fun, especially for titles, but also, maybe a bit more work than is merited it could be argued.

What are some of the major changes you've had to make to your style for fakku?

My question was more about reducing png file size while retaining dimensions, though you answered my question regardless by saying that you process the images a second time in Photoshop.

I have terrible handwriting lol so no I haven't ever done that myself. Though one time I called my mom to write something for me when I was freelancing for a local politician running haha. He wanted a letter done "a wife letter" which is just a mailer from the wife's side of things and he had said "Just put it in some cursive kind of font" and that's just a no-no when you're trying to express a personalized letter which was what the purpose of this letter was to be. Mind you it was like midnight and my mom was a total life saver :P I certainly didn't get my handwriting from her.

With Illustrator it has pretty much endless options on how to manipulate text for titles and I haven't ran into an instance where I had to hand-do something. I have a feeling if I did run into that I'd have to see about someone else doing it. We actually have a new editor on staff who hasn't had the opportunity to introduce themselves yet. They're an actual illustrator and their skills would probably suit that situation better.

I'll be the first one to say I'm not an illustrator :) just a graphic designer.


As far as it goes with my differences in style compared to when I was doing scanlation or working with Project-H compared to now:

I would say it's primarily typesetting. I tend to typeset on the small side (sometimes too small now that I look at old work), so I've really had to amp up my size and bubble to text fill ratio. The way I typeset is also much differently than I used to do it regarding the shape of the text and rag.



The rag is the shape that the text makes on the left and right sides of the text. (In that image, it'd be considered Flush left, rag right (FL/RR), and graphic design basically has it engraved in my head super hard that the larger the rag, the bigger your issue is with typography. It was something I was kinda OCD about even before school, where I just liked my lines of text in more of a box shape with a minimal rag.

However we follow more of a system where we follow the shape of the bubble and try to fill out more of the bubble. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that, and it looks great, it's just an aesthetic preference and the most important thing is that we're just consistent with it :)

Other then that, they give me pretty much free reign on how I handle my SFX, as long as it's appropriate with the original SFX, doesn't cover too much art, and in general just looks nice.

https://www.fakku.net/forums/books/homunculus-renai-sample/page/5#4263958
https://www.fakku.net/forums/books/pyon-kti-punikano#4256407

These two posts appear to have fully edited pages.

Okay, I wondered as well. Glad that got answered for you