Photoshop CS5 and the Impact on Scanlation

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Photoshop CS5 and the Impact on Scanlation

It’s hardly four days till Adobe launches the next iteration of its – I dare say – most successful and most pirated piece of software. Here is the perspective and expectations from someone who had experience with Photoshop since version 7 and who avidly uses it for tasks involving images, including of course, scanlation.

Some people might argue that GIMP as an open source alternative is just as good, but most people who have had in-depth experience with Photoshop know otherwise. It’s the usability and lots of small yet crucial features that makes Photoshop the favorite among scanlators. Some groups even go as far as requiring their editors to use Photoshop. While GIMP certainly will get the job done, it will do so by consuming a lot more time, and time is a precious good when a single manga chapter averages out at 30 pages and involves a lot of routine tasks to be carried out.

CS4, the currently latest version of Photoshop, already brought a few great features. The support for hardware acceleration based on the graphics card not only improved the performance, but also allowed better preview scaling and most important of all (at least for scanlators), preview when using clone stamp right on the drawing cursor. While content-aware scaling is a cool feature, I personally almost never use it.
So what’s so special about CS5 that I dedicate an entire blog post to it? Watch and be amazed…

What does this mean for scanlators? You might already know that FoOlRulez puts a lot effort into editing, not only translating the text in the bubbles, but also replacing sound effects, however large it might be, with understandable English equivalent. That requires something we call redrawing: large chunks of what was japanese sound effect text have to be replaced by what we think might have been the original picture behind the sound effect. That, sometimes, takes a lot of time, depending on the size and the content to redraw.

See what my point is? Exactly, this time-consuming part of editing might be shortened a lot, if the feature shown on the demo video works as perfectly as we all are hoping it would.

Stay tuned and just maybe, FoOlRulez might be able to churn out fresh scanlations at an even faster pace, at the same high quality standard.

17 Responses to “Photoshop CS5 and the Impact on Scanlation”

  2. Lucid_Yume says:

    That video is insane… How the hell does it do that?!! Well, I shouldn’t question genius… especially if it’ll get us more scanlations :)

  3. Bandages says:

    I saw this on an h-blog, where the owner was saying it was gonna revolutionize decensoring.

    I was pretty impressed w/ that video when I first saw it, but it makes me wonder, what if the sky was a little more complicated looking than a clear blue sky? I’d like to see it in action with a more complicated image, if you ask me.

    • woxxy says:

      Well, manga have patterns, which means the engine of that algorithm might work even better than on photos.

      Those images are already quite complex in my opinion. Of course you can’t decensor stuff, it just copies patterns.

  4. scizzer12 says:

    I’d like to see it zoomed in. I’ll probably still prefer to do my redraws by hand because I’m a perfectionist.

    Also guor, preview for the clone stamp is in CS3 too.

    • guorbatschow says:

      wut. i mean, you see what you are copying on the curse instead of a transparent cursor for the clonestamp. that was made possible by using overlaying using hardware acceleration afaik.

  8. Lenners says:

    “Stay tuned and just maybe, FoOlRulez might be able to churn out fresh scanlations at an even faster pace, at the same high quality standard.”

    I laughed.

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