Bitter Change: Ch.12 & Ch.13

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Bitter Change Ch.12 — DDL: [MEGA] | Online: [Reader]
Bitter Change Ch.13 — DDL: [MEGA] | Online: [Reader]

I was supposed to release this on the 20th, but I pulled a Togashi and played through all of Xillia and some of Xillia 2 in one fell swoop. I also got really drunk and tried to stream play Shovel Knight and eventually some bad Compile Heart games like Neptunia and Fairy Fencer F because I don’t know. Please don’t drink and scanlate, kids.

Release Notes:

Would like to take a moment to talk about the clean. The raw for this is pretty crappy. The paper itself is very low quality and doesn’t retain ink well at all. Initially I received the raw as a compressed JPG and tried to live with it. After a while I was able to tell that something wasn’t exactly ‘right’ with the scan, so I got the scanner to scan a page as uncompressed as possible. In this image you can see that the right contains much more individual detail as opposed to the left. The problem with that is still the fact that the screentones are very miniscule. That image is off a 600 DPI scan. Straight up using levels/curves would destroy the screentone regardless of compression. Any sort of blurring would typically do the same.

Before the rescan I was already deploying a 3x Unsharp Mask to bring out them as much as possible, at the expense of some of the rest of the page looking oversharpened or overleveled. Doing so also brought out a lot of page noise in the blacks which made dealing with them a pain. This leads me to believe that I will end up having to rescan/reclean the tank for the ‘complete’ version, whenever that time comes. I’m curious as to what others’ methodology would be for dealing with this so any suggestions would be cool.

21 thoughts on “Bitter Change: Ch.12 & Ch.13”

  3. Heh, gender pronoun confusion as usual~ Dumb English.
    Ooh, a short & to-the-point ‘arc’ as with Kinoshita.

    Thanks for the double release!

    Wow, even with the explanation & examples, reading the chapters was smooth. You all performed quite the magic on the RAWs,well, if you’re willing to disregard undiscerning eyes…. Thanks for the dedication!

    Heh, drinking & good ideas seldom go together~ If it happens again, hopefully you’ll be able to find a less painful set of distractions.

  5. Very good, thanks a lot /3w/ for this double release!
    About the clean issue, I may have cheap eyes, but I think the team’s clean is one of the best I’ve seen in Scanlating.
    So you did great.

  8. I meant to comment about the scan issues. I’m not sure what kind of paper it is or how it is being scanned, the scanner should be using a black paper/cloth behind the paper to make the contrast more… alive? Anyway, lets assume you have to deal with what you have… I did some… lab experiments (?) and the best I would be able to come up with it’s . I don’t know if it looks better or in anyway an improvement compared to what you do. But all I did there is easily converted to an “action”, there’s no manual actions in the example.
    Anyway, if interested I could described exactly what I did, you should be able to see my mail, I would gladly help out.

      • Yeah, that method there works pretty well for that section of the page. I more or less ended up with the same conclusions in initial testing. I didn’t really elaborate on the larger issue since I didn’t think anyone would read that wall of text, haha. Also, all pages have a black backing and weighed down when scanned, but it doesn’t help much here.

        The “using levels/curves would destroy the screentone” was more in reference to a different section on that same page, which is on multiple pages, that deals with even less visible inverted screentones. So it becomes more of a balancing act between recovering both sets of tones without destroying the other. Both are easily manageable if done manually, but I’m very lazy.

        • “I didn’t think anyone would read that wall of text, haha.” Fine, I’m not reading anymore! D=

          Fixing screentones manually, who is their right mind would do such a thing? That’s madness! < Also lazy as hell.

          So, correct me if I'm wrong, you using "sharpen" tools to make the image more neat in order to then fix tones. But in order to restore some details you losing others, like making the lines too thin.
          I myself would not use "sharpen", I never do actually, in my example I didn't recover the detail by using it, but by applying a filter that restore extremities, aka dark and light. So all that gray soup gets more neat, but it doesn't affect the areas already black or white, that's why I had to do it after (in the example).

          I made a quick use of the filter in your screentone so you could see what I mean. http://pessoal.hwey.org/2.jpg
          I didn't put much effort or configured properly, so I looks a little too much, but you can see that the line itself is not much affected, but the gray soup took form. I put curves at the end to make it even more obvious. In a larger quality the details should get even more neat and make the suitcase lines more visible.

          So, that's my suggestion! Now, go find translators for Muromi-san, gogogo!

        • Ahh, you reminded me of something that I wrote down in my notes while testing but forgot about it since then. I’ll probably give it a go once I get the book myself to scan. The quality doesn’t go any higher than the example images, which unfortunate unto itself.

          The reason why I sharpen is to counter-balance against poor quality/high compression. In those cases I favor working backwards from sharpened tones and and rework the page, but that doesn’t always work out well. But yeah, thanks for enlightening me a bit.

  9. Noooo, bad cliffhanger, looks like trouble. But I am rather surprised about this sudden release as well. From the previous intervals I expected to wait somehow more than 2,5 months.
    It was only to be expected that the guy-in-girl would end up as something like a hero. When the story goes on in High School I think “he” will end up being a favorite of both genders very soon.

  10. Thank you for the chapters!

    I was wondering, did you guys dropped Muromi-san? Just curious, last chapter was released about… 4~5 months ago? Assuming there’s some staff problem, maybe I could help, I have plenty experience with edition/cleaning/redrawing, I would gladly do any test required and help in this project.

    Thank you again!

        • I’m sorry to hear that. Sadly, I got plenty work already in my hands, I was willing to take one more for the sake of reading Muromi. Also I find it quite hard to work on projects that I don’t like that much or at all, unless it somehow rewards me with what I want. I need a carrot, pretty much.

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