Hunting the Elusive

This full colour book was released 31 December 2007, at Comiket 73. It is 16 pages of Mako Tatekawa goodness. As a testament to how much Magi-cu owned, or perhaps to the cheapness of this artist, at least four of the images used in this book have already been previously scanned by yours truly. Still, might be useful to have another copy, and I've improved my processing capabilities since those scans, so these might be better. [Download: Archive] [Directory]

Other than the four pics from Aquarian Age, the rest are all pretty much original doujin illustrations of characters such as Fate (Nanoha), Ama (Shuffle), Nerine (Shuffle), Rin (Fate/stay), Shirogane Akane (Kanogi), Tomoyo (Tomoyo After, or more famously, Clannad), Mikan (original character for GREENWOOD), Saber (Fate/stay), and Miku (Vocaloid).

Oh. And on the cover, there's Louise. From Zero no Tsukaima.

Anyhow, this was a fairly thin book, so I put a bit more attention into manually cleaning up the pictures. I think I might have reached the stage where my cleanup efforts have attained a good balance between denoising and detail preservation. Not to say they're perfect or whatever, but I've come a long way since those Strawberry Panic scans.

This was not the case during some of my earlier efforts. Most of the time, I over-compensated and wiped out details, but many people don't notice as they don't study the scan in full resolution, or they don't have the original to compare it against.

Still, there is always the balance you need to strike between batch processing (relatively painless, and a good way to dispose of large amounts of scans in an efficient manner) and manually going through each picture to take out artifacts. With bigger releases (more scans to go through), I don't have the time (or the mousing strength) to do manual nitpicking, so those might suffer a bit in cleanup. Perhaps its a lesson to me to keep the releases small. Quality over quantity eh?

As you can well appreciate, my scanning efforts are constantly undergoing refinements as I learn how to do things by myself. There's no definitive class out there about how to do these things, and the methods to properly scan and process materials are pretty much a secret traders' art (especially amongst the upper echelons of scanners, some of whom are holed up in certain graphics communities).

One day, perhaps, I might cover my own self-taught scanning and cleaning techniques in this blog. Which is the operative word in that sentence? I'll leave you to decide.