To mark off the occasion of A Side Character's Love Story Vol. 3 coming out today, I wanted to delve a bit deeper into the usually under-appreciated art of doing retouch work in Photoshop for manga lettering.

You can find out more information about the series below: https://twitter.com/FogMediocrity/status/1247418846899834880

Some people believe that you only need to place the text on the page, but that's not the case. Normally, the pages that we receive have bubble/panel text omitted, but any aside text (and/or SFX) need to be removed/replaced. Here is an example showing JP original -> final output.

For simple screentone patterns or backgrounds, using a brush tool, clone stamp tool, or spot healing brush tool is more than sufficient to get good results. However, when you start dealing with more detailed backgrounds and patterns, things obviously get a bit more complicated.

For gradient screentones, usually one would sample from another area of the page and attempt to fix the gradient manually with either the clone stamp tool, or use spot healing brush/content aware fill to hopefully create a good enough result so that it can be covered by text.

Sometimes, you're required to retouch things like people's hair and faces. It can be difficult sometimes to recreate an artist's work and make it look seamless. It doesn't have to be perfect, but if you make it look good to normal eyes, you've done your job.

This was probably the most extreme of the volume, taking bits of everything mentioned above and put it on a single page. At this point, the goal is to do a good enough job with all the tools available to make it look good once the text is applied on top of the art.

It takes a lot of effort to letter a manga volume, and retouch is both the most time consuming and the most under-appreciated. Normal readers won't appreciate a good retouch, but will definitely notice and complain about the bad retouch jobs.