Teclo wrote...
It doesn't matter if they're censored with a white square, a black square or a picture of John Malkovic, the result is the same: you have to delete it in Photoshop and redraw it yourself. Decensoring is a bit of an misnomer because you're not magically removing the censorship, as the word implies.
Older hentai sets (CG stuff, not doujinshi) used to have a type of censoring where they'd scramble and pixellate the image around the genitals. You could literally decensor that if you know the pattern of the scrambling; there were only so many types. You'd run it through a special program and it would unscramble the censored bit.
Hentai movies usually just put blurs over the genitals rather than literally drawing over them. They can be removed if you have the original footage (rather than the commercially sold copies) but the studios don't usually bother to draw anything in under the blur. It's one of the reasons hentai used to be associated so much with underage sex, even when they were obviously no lolis in the movie; when the US companies took away the censor blur, the girls had no pubes at all. Add to that the fact that they wear the school uniforms for longer in Japan (in the UK, compulsory uniform stops at 16) and you see why all the tabloids thought it was CP. You'll also see in many hentai movies and h-games that the US company drew in the genitals themselves and it often looks fucking terrible. Either that, or they got those infamous Korean animators to do it for them.
That lecture on censoring aside, I don't know for 100% certain why we as a whole stopped decensoring but I'd bet quite a lot of money on it being because it takes way too much time and most people just accept censorship anyway. You'd be surprised how much of a bastard it is to just edit the translated text in when the original Japanese was written outside of a white speech bubble. It's the sort of thing people naturally take for granted, but if a doujinshi consistently has text outside of bubbles, it can lengthen the time the editing takes considerably.
Teclo, as usual, did an amazing job explaining things.
Basically like he said it just takes too much time to decensor an entire chapter, whoever is working on it literally has to redraw those parts of the manga. And we are
very strict about how faithful it is to the original artists style so it takes a lot of time. If we started doing that again releases would go back to being 3 - 4 weeks apart so alternatively we just release that don't have horrible censorship.