How to Clean Manga Raws: A Step-by-Step Guide

Cleaning means removing the original text and sound effects from a page so the typesetter can put the translation on top. Most of a chapter is quick bubble work; the time goes into text that sits on top of artwork, which has to be redrawn so nobody can tell anything was there. This guide walks through both, in the order you will actually meet them.

The examples use Photoshop terms because most groups use it, but every step works in GIMP, Krita, Clip Studio Paint or Photopea. The tool names differ; the logic does not.

Before you touch a pixel

Work at the raw's resolution

Do not resize the raw before cleaning. Upscaling invents detail that was never there and makes screentone mushy; downscaling throws away detail you might need for redraws. Clean at the size you received, and let the group decide release size at the very end.

If your group upscales or denoises raws, that happens before cleaning, as its own step, so every cleaner starts from the same file.

Open a copy, never the original

Keep the downloaded raw untouched in its own folder. You will want it later: to compare, to redo a page, or when QC asks "what was under this bubble?"

Set up your layers

A clean file that the next person can fix in thirty seconds looks like this, from top to bottom:

1. Redraw — painted or cloned reconstruction over art.
2. Clean — flat white (or flat colour) fills inside bubbles.
3. Levels / adjustments — optional, for B&W pages (see below).
4. Raw — the original page, locked.

Never paint directly on the raw layer. If you do, a mistake means starting over; with separate layers, QC can hide your redraw layer and see exactly what you changed.

Step 1: Level black-and-white pages

Scanned or photographed B&W pages often have grey "white" paper and washed-out blacks. A Levels adjustment fixes most of this: move the white point until the paper is pure white and the black point until the ink is solid black, without crushing the midtones where screentone lives.

Check two things after levelling:

• Screentone dots still look like dots, not a grey smear or solid black.
• Thin lines (hair, background detail) have not disappeared.

Digital-native raws (most webtoons and many recent manga) usually do not need this. If the white is already 255, leave it alone.

Step 2: Clean the speech bubbles

This is most of the volume and the fastest part. The aim is a bubble that is completely empty, with its border untouched.

1. Select the inside of the bubble. The Magic Wand with a low tolerance and Contiguous on works for clean white bubbles. Expand the selection by 1–3 px so it eats the anti-aliased edges of the letters, but not so far that it bites into the bubble's outline.
2. Fill with white (or the bubble's colour) on the clean layer.
3. Zoom to 200% and look for leftovers: punctuation, tiny furigana, dots from ellipses, grey halos around where letters were.

Some practical habits:

• Batch it. Select every plain bubble on the page at once (Shift-click with the wand), expand, fill once.
• Watch for letters touching the border. The wand selection stops at the letter, so the letter survives. Brush those by hand.
• Coloured or gradient bubbles cannot be filled flat. Treat them like coloured backgrounds (Step 5).
• Thought bubbles and soft-edged boxes have fuzzy borders. Fill the middle, then brush the edges with a soft brush at low opacity.

Step 3: Text over flat or simple backgrounds

Narration boxes, text on white space between panels, captions on plain backgrounds: select the area around the text, sample the background colour, fill. If the background is a smooth gradient, use the gradient tool with colours sampled from either side, or the healing tools described below.

Step 4: Text and SFX over artwork (redraw)

This is the skill that separates a cleaner from a good cleaner. The original text is sitting on top of hair, clothes, backgrounds or speed lines, and you have to rebuild what is underneath.

Understand what each tool actually does

Tool	What it does	Best for	Watch out for
Clone Stamp	Copies pixels exactly from a source point	Repeating patterns, screentone, speed lines, straight edges	Visible repeated patches if you clone from one spot
Healing Brush	Copies texture from a source, blends colour/tone to the target	Skin, soft shading, paper texture	Smears hard lines and edges
Spot Healing / Content-Aware	Guesses the fill from surroundings, no source chosen	Small marks on busy or noisy areas	Invents nonsense near lines and faces
Brush / Pen	You paint it yourself	Line art, hair strands, panel borders	Line weight must match the original

GIMP's Heal and Clone tools and Krita's Smart Patch and Clone tools cover the same ground. Whatever you use, the principle is the same: automatic tools are a starting point, never the finish.

The redraw order that works

1. Remove the text first, roughly. Fill or heal the letters out, even if the result is ugly. You need to see the shape of the hole.
2. Rebuild the lines. Continue the line art through the gap with a brush or pen at the same weight. Follow the curve the artist was drawing; extend from both sides and meet in the middle.
3. Rebuild flat areas. Fill the shapes the lines now define with the right flat colour or tone.
4. Rebuild texture and shading last. Clone or heal shading, hatching and screentone into the flats.
5. Zoom out. View the page at reading size. Redraws that look perfect at 300% often look wrong at 50%, and the reverse.

Speed lines and radial lines

Find the vanishing point the lines radiate from and use a ruler or a perspective/radial guide. Draw each missing line from that centre. Cloning radial lines from elsewhere almost always produces lines pointing the wrong way.

When you cannot know what was underneath

Sometimes a big SFX covers half a face. You have three honest options: redraw your best reconstruction, keep the original SFX and add a small translation next to it, or replace it with a translated SFX of similar size that covers the same area. Talk to your typesetter and team lead before you spend two hours on a reconstruction nobody asked for.

Step 5: Screentone

Screentone is a pattern of dots (or lines) printed at a fixed angle and frequency. It breaks easily.

• Clone, do not heal. Healing tools blend, which turns dots into grey mush.
• Align the clone source to the grid. Pick a source point on the same dot, then move along the pattern. If the dots line up when you start painting, the pattern continues seamlessly.
• Keep the brush hard-edged and the opacity at 100%. Soft brushes create half-dots that show up as a blurry ring.
• For large areas, sample a clean patch of the tone, define it as a pattern, and fill the area with it, matching the angle.
• Gradated tone (dots that grow larger across the area) is the hardest case. Clone along the direction where dot size stays constant.

If the raw has been resized at some point, the tone may show moiré (wavy interference). Do not try to "fix" it on one area only; the patched area will look different from the rest.

Step 6: Colour webtoons and gradients

Colour webtoons bring their own problems:

• Gradient bubbles and backgrounds. Sample colours at the top and bottom of the area and fill with a gradient on its own layer, then lower opacity or add a little noise if the original is textured.
• Soft glows and lighting effects. Rebuild the base colour first, then add the glow back with a large soft brush at low opacity.
• Noise and grain. Many digital raws carry subtle noise or compression artefacts. A perfectly smooth patch in a noisy area stands out. A small amount of added noise on the redraw layer helps it blend.
• Text that crosses two panels or the gutter between them. Clean each panel separately; the gutter is usually flat.

For long-strip work, clean on a stitched piece rather than on separate slices, so a bubble that crosses a slice boundary is not cleaned twice with a visible seam. The webtoon stitching and splitting guide covers how to do that, and the free webtoon stitcher does it in the browser.

Step 7: Save and hand off

What to save

• The working file with layers (PSD, or your software's native format). This is what anyone fixing your work will open.
• A flattened export for the typesetter if your group typesets on flat images. Use PNG for B&W pages; JPG at a high quality setting is acceptable for colour pages if your group agrees.

Do not save over the same JPG repeatedly. Every JPG save loses a little quality, and the losses stack.

Naming

Keep the raw's page numbers and use zero padding: 012.png, not 12.png. Sorted file lists then match reading order on every system.

The handoff note

Your typesetter needs to know a few things your files cannot say:

• Which SFX you removed and which you left for them to handle.
• Any page where the redraw is a guess they might want to cover with text.
• Pages that need a second look ("p. 14 hair redraw rough, will improve if time").

Short is fine. Silence is not.

Common mistakes

• Expanding the bubble selection too far. The bubble's outline gets thinner on one side. Readers notice uneven borders even if they cannot say why.
• Leaving grey halos. Anti-aliased letter edges are light grey, and the wand misses them. Expand the selection or check at 200%.
• Healing over line art. It produces a smudge where a crisp line should be. Draw lines; heal only textures.
• Cleaning on the raw layer. No way back, and QC cannot see what changed.
• Over-levelling. Pure-black shadows and vanished screentone. Level gently.
• Forgetting small text. Signs, phone screens, furigana, author notes in the margin, the tiny "..." in an empty bubble. Ask your team which of these you clean.
• Polishing what will be covered. If a large translated SFX will sit there anyway, a perfect redraw underneath is wasted time. Agree on SFX handling first.

Practice drills for a new cleaner

If you are learning, these build skill faster than cleaning whole chapters:

1. Bubble sprint. Take five pages, clean only the bubbles, and time yourself. Then check every bubble at 200%. Repeat until you find no leftovers.
2. Line continuation. Draw a few curves, erase a 1 cm gap in each, and rebuild the gap so it is invisible. Then try it on hair.
3. Screentone patch. Erase a square in a toned area and rebuild it with the clone tool until you cannot find the seam at 100%.
4. Speed-line rebuild. Erase a block of radial lines and redraw them from the vanishing point.
5. Blind comparison. Clean a page, then have someone flick between your result and a different clean of the same page (or the original art if it exists). Where they spot the difference is what to practise next.

Cleaning checklist

• Worked at original resolution, on a copy of the raw
• Separate layers: raw (locked), clean, redraw
• No leftover punctuation, furigana or grey halos at 200%
• Bubble borders intact and even
• Line art continues naturally through every redraw
• Screentone aligned, no blurred dots
• Page checked at reading size, not just zoomed in
• Layered file and flat export saved, zero-padded names
• Handoff note sent to the typesetter

Where this fits

Cleaning runs on the art track, in parallel with translation, and both meet at typesetting. The scanlation workflow, explained shows the whole chain. If your group tracks chapters in FansubPanel, the cleaner marks the cleaning step as done on the chapter and the typesetter sees that it is ready, so the handoff does not depend on someone noticing a chat message.

Next: how to typeset manga and webtoons picks up where this guide ends. For definitions, see cleaning and redraw in the glossary.