mDuo13

In the process of translating Tabi to Michizure, I came across this peculiar little two-page spread. As you might notice above in the circled sections of my scan... some parts of the image simply don't continue onto the other page. What gives, TANAKANOKA? Did you have different assistants finish up each page separately? In any case, this page, and all its action lines, presented something of a challenge to clean up for proper translation and release. I had to come up with an unusual yet effective method in order to fix it.

Now, the first thing one might be tempted to do in cleaning up a page like this is resort to the clone brush. Unfortunately, the lines are angled in such a way that this is not particularly effective, and tends to leave jags where some lines connect straight-on but others do not. But it's not like one can fill the missing line sections in using a brush or even by stroking lines made with the pen tool in Photoshop, as they come out too thin at 1px and too thick at 2px, and damned if my hand is steady enough that I could do it using my tablet. Thus, I had to make each line a two-step process.

Of course, first I just filled in wide swaths of white where the line corrections would be, to give myself a clean surface to work on. Next up, I sampled the black or dark grey that each line was using - the same color could be reused for a few similar lines, but not for all of them. Using the pen tool, I created a path to bridge the gap in the line - a process that proved harder than it should've been because a couple of lines did not actually continue on the other side of the page gap at all - and stroked it with 2 pixels of that black or off-black, using a 100% hard round brush. This produces a line that follows the right trend but is a little thick - hopefully one side is flush while the other side sticks out a bit. (I was working pretty highly-zoomed-in for this whole process.) The next trick was to take my grab path tool and scoot that working path just a little to the side that was too thick - just one or two pixels off - and stroke it white with that same 2px round brush. The result was surprisingly close to the original line's thickness. Then I just repeated that for each line, touched up some of the connecting edges using the pencil tool, and shazam! Our cleaned and translated image: