So you have your scanned raws and now you need to know what to do with them right? It helps your workflow if you have some kind of organization before you start to work on a chapter of manga. The following is simply my way of doing things and it works for me. You can change it around to suit your own needs. There are a few things that the order of doing is more important than others and I will point those out when I get to them. I just find that if I do things in a particular order it helps me to not leave out any steps that need to be done.
First I have all my programs open and loaded with the info I need when I start. I open up my script in Word, I have Photoshop open and ready and I have ACDee open for viewing the images. I like to use an image viewer since my images look different in a viewer than they do in Photoshop. I can often see things that I might have missed by doing this. I don't know about you but I tend to get a bit 'myopic' when I'm editing so having an additional way to look at my images helps me see what I might have been overlooking.
Once I have my programs open then I can start the editing process.
1) Open the first page in the chapter I am going work on in Photoshop.
2) Check to so if the page needs cropping or straightening. Do that if it needs it.
3) Level the page.
4) Clean up any additional gray areas that didn't get cleaned with leveling.
5) Redraw any lines that need it.
6) Erase the original text.
7) Resize the image (this should be the last thing you do before typesetting. Two reasons why is that if you have a specific font size for your group they usual mean that size after the page has been sized to their specifications. So this way you don't have text that is too big for that group! Also you can do better cloning and patching before the resize since the resolution changes and that means you can lose detail that you could have put to good use if you resize before cloning and patching.)
8) Place the translated text in the page.
9) Save image as .psd
10) View the completed work in image viewer.
11) Save all files in format required by group.
12) Make a zip file of the chapter.
13) Email or upload to the desired location.
Once I have the chapter complete I go through it page by page in my image viewer. I am looking for many things including dark spots left over from gutter shadow, text placement in bubbles, less than ideal cloning/editing jobs that show up, and other things that I might have missed when I first worked on the page.
I will go into more detail on how to do these tasks in each tutorial. I tend to work the pages in order most of the time so that I don't lose track of what is done and what still needs doing. This is also a checks and balance system for me since if I do them in order I will be less likely to miss a page.
So lets move on to straightening and cropping.