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Resizing and Unsharp Mask and more

Time to shrink the image. I go to Image Size in the Image menu and up pops the Image Size box. First I set the Resolution to 72. All resolution really affects is text size since it's not being printed and will just display at one pixel per pixel anyway. What setting it to 72 does is make the text sizes match one point per pixel. If you always use the same resolution, text sizes will become familiar to you so you'll have a better feel for what text size to type in when you need text to match the size of the original. Now, I'm not talking about text in this guide so that's enough of that... Since we use a standard height of 1100 pixels tall, I then type that in for the height. The width adjusts itself accordingly.

I'm sticking a copy of the resized picture at this link. It may help to examine it to see how much more cleaning it needs.

After resizing, here's what levels looks like. You'll see that again there is some distribution of should-be-black and should-be-white pixels that aren't what they should be. So, I do curves again.

This time I adjust the black end only from 0 to 9 rather than to 21 because of the dark-cloud screens near the bottom. If the page didn't have anything that might legitimately have very dark luminosity I might still go to 21 with the page at final size. Again I adjust the white end from 246 to 255 and then use the history brush. After doing curves and history, the Levels looks like the next image.

Below on the left is a wanded image before doing curvesWhat good has the whole resizing and curving operation done? Let's take a look with the magic wand.. On the right is the same image after doing curves. Pretty much every dirt speck in the left image was gone after doing curves so I didn't bother showing it. Since there was a little dirt left further down I took a shot of that instead. This remaining dirt was easy to take care of though, with just a few specks visible. Black, shown further down, is a little more work after curves but not time consuming.

The full image after curves and history brushing is here. You may notice that it looks a bit blurry or unclear. The way I fix this is by doing Unsharp Mask. It can be found in the Filter menu under Sharpen.

If I do an unsharp mask after the resize, the settings I use are Amount 50%, Radius 0.4, and Threshold 0. Generally, I always use Amount 50% and never go above 0.4 for 1100px-tall final pages. Manga like Hikaru no Go which currently have good scans might benefit from an unsharp mask of Radius 0.2, but higher than that would probably do more harm than good. Unsharp mask can make lines too jagged if they are clear enough already. It can also make grey areas more spotty and uneven than they were before. So once again I turn to the history brush. What I brush in this picture is uninterrupted grey areas such as on Creed's face and hair to the left, and jagged line danger areas. Lines most likely to get too jagged during Unsharp Mask are lines that are close to (within 15 degrees or so) vertical or horizontal, or the areas of curved lines that are tangent to the vertical or horizontal. Here are a couple small examples of things that needed history brushing in this image (2 curved bubbles below and the slanted panel borders to the right). By the way here's what Levels looks like after doing these steps. And the final version of the page, with everything complete except for text replacement, is here.

[Crop] [Gutter] [Bent lines] [Dirt] [Curves] [Resize & Unsharp] [PNG Save]