RAW — The Untranslated Source Chapter
What RAW means in scanlation, where RAWs come from, what resolution is enough, and why RAW sourcing is the step groups forget to assign.
Updated:
A RAW is the untranslated, unedited source chapter — the original Japanese, Korean or Chinese pages exactly as published. Sourcing the RAW is step one of any scanlation workflow.
Where do RAWs come from?
Three common sources: official digital distribution, scans of printed volumes, and original pages from web publishing platforms. The source type directly determines how hard the next steps will be — a scan needs far more cleaning than a digital page.
What resolution is enough?
The working rule: at least 1.5× your target publishing width. If you release at 800px, work from 1200px or better. A low-resolution RAW cannot be upscaled after the fact; even when the lettering looks sharp, the artwork behind it falls apart.
Webtoons add a wrinkle: long-strip format arrives in slices, and slice boundaries can cut through a panel. That creates invisible extra work in cleaning and typesetting.
Why does RAW sourcing stall so often?
Because it does not look like work. Translation, cleaning, typesetting all produce something. Sourcing is searching, and when it is done there is nothing to show. The result: it gets assigned to nobody, sits in "someone will handle it," and the chapter never starts.
The practical fix is to treat RAW sourcing as an assignable step like any other. Who owns it and by when — without those two facts, it is skipped systematically.
Common mistakes
- Mixing sources across chapters. If chapter 12 is a scan and 13 is digital, readers notice.
- Re-compressing. Saving JPEG as JPEG loses quality every pass; use a lossless format for intermediates.
- Not verifying page order. Scanned volumes arrive out of order more often than you would expect, and it is usually caught in QC.
Related
Once the RAW is ready, two tracks start in parallel: translation on the text side, cleaning on the art side.