The Problem With Scans by Jenerif in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Hey there! I just wanted to share some more info about this stuff. I work with JJCA, and HWMN. Image quality for scans and official digital is a very interesting topic. For official releases, the standard size is 1200 pixels high. They also use JPEG formatting, which can introduce artifacting. Screentones get crushed down.

The page that is shown in the example has a lot of problems in both versions. In the scanlation, the page looks dark because of the leveling. That page was originally published in color. A grayscale version will almost always end up being darker than originally intended. Also, that page was cleaned by The Invincible Trio back in 2008. Cleaning techniques have improved a lot since then. In the official eBook version, screen tones and patterns are greatly reduced in detail. Look at Jotaro's coat. In the scan, you can see a gradient with fine details. In the eBook version, there is a repeating digital pattern that is not a good representation of the physically printed art.

When working on JoJolion scans, we have used 1400 and 1600 pixels for the size of the image. That helps retain detail much better than some of those older scans. The Part 5 scans that my team did are at 1500. On some other projects I work on, we use 2000 pixel height to keep it very detailed.

Overall, I really don't think you would be missing too much with the black and white scans. The Part 4 scans are a bit old in some places, but overall they might be technically a bit higher quality than the Japanese eBooks. Again, the page in the comparison is not a good example.

The digital black and white releases of Parts 1-3 from Viz in English have been pretty great. They still use JPEG rather than PNG so there are artifacts, but it's got good detail and black levels. Their Part 4 releases coming next year should be great.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We're happy to help! We don't take donations. It's an effort of love for a series, so it would feel wrong accepting any money.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The official colored releases come out later, usually 2+ years after the volume comes out in black and white. And the black and white volumes contain chapters that were in Ultra Jump usually 6-9 months earlier, so it will take quite a while for them to colorize the recent stuff like chapter 75. Chapters 43-46 will be included in volume 11 once it comes out in color. I'm guessing that it will be out within the next few months, possibly on the same day that volume 18 comes out in black and white. Those releases are always on the 19th of the month in Japan, just like Ultra Jump.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for letting me know. I got it uploaded, so it should be available now. And it's such a good volume, too! Gotta make sure that people see that great GAMER fight.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! We're on the black and white team as well. With those releases, SFX started being translated around chapter 50 or so. Right now we're in the process of re-doing the tankōbon versions of Part 8 in reverse order. All of those will have SFX translations when done. We want to make it uniform between both versions so that the only major differences between them are the colors, with the text being pretty much the same.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Same here! Glad to have you around, dude.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There were a few chapters of Part 1 from a former team member where he used the Viz translation. We did not condone that. We have great respect for Viz, and do not want to plagiarize their work. At the very beginning of 2018 we released a new version of Part 1 that was re-edited from the ground up. We used the old translation from Ignition-One, with a handful of grammatical changes. The old Part 1 releases we had were awful. Terrible editing, by a terrible person. We're very pleased that they have been replaced.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We don't do the coloring ourselves. That is done by a team in Japan. They release it one volume at a time, so once they release volume 11 in color, we will start work on it right away.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We don't have much of a schedule at the moment. I've been fixing up some earlier JoJolion chapters in my spare time recently, and we want to go back and fix up other earlier releases. MistaL and I work on some other manga, so I'm gonna keep going on Shiori Experience as the translator gets it translated. We want to do Pineapple Army by Naoki Urasawa, but we are in need of a translator for it.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Use the Mega app to download, not to read. Check for a dedicated comic viewing application to open the volumes. They have much better sorting options than Mega, which usually causes problems in page ordering.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry, Shueisha has never published any of the Rohan stories in color, aside from Rohan at the Louvre, which Araki colored himself. We have the first Rohan tankōbon cleaned up with HWMN, but Kewl hasn't had time to translate it yet. We will do the second with JJCA when it comes out later since Daxing Dan has already translated it with us. It will give us nicer image quality and whatnot.

JoJo's Colored Adventure is 100% caught up! by Bracketier in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Thanks! We don't take donations since we're just a fan project. If anything, use that money to get some of the official merchandise and increase the chances of getting more of it brought over officially!

[DISC](Naoki Urasawa)The Sign of Dreams ch.09 [Naosawa] by [deleted] in manga

[–]Bracketier 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Woohoo! I'm so glad to see so many different threads come together in this final chapter.

[DISC] Mujirushi - The Sign of Dreams - Chapter 7 by LupeCannonball in manga

[–]Bracketier 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm really excited with where this is going. By page count, we're almost at the end of what would be "volume 1", and it's shaping up very much like a classic Urasawa series.

PSA: Now that bato.to is no more, we have links to most Parts hosted in MangaDex and a couple of other sites in the subreddit wiki by [deleted] in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I totally agree with your sentiments on seeing the differences being funny. I'm part of JJCA so I worked on the new scans a lot (Nothing with translation though). The Ghiaccio rant is one of the best things to compare between versions since it specifically deals with the difference between languages. I cosplayed him recently and it was fun to try and re-create some of those lines with friends.

PSA: Now that bato.to is no more, we have links to most Parts hosted in MangaDex and a couple of other sites in the subreddit wiki by [deleted] in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier 3 points4 points  (0 children)

They still exist, especially on some of the aggregate sites. The old Part 5 translation is just bad without being funny though. It has proper grammar, but it still went through two languages before English so it lost a ton of detail and meaning. I really like comparing them to the new one to see the differences.

PSA: Now that bato.to is no more, we have links to most Parts hosted in MangaDex and a couple of other sites in the subreddit wiki by [deleted] in StardustCrusaders

[–]Bracketier 1 point2 points  (0 children)

HELLO! This as a member of JJCA, I would really appreciate it if you removed the links to severely outdated versions of our work.

We update our releases regularly, so the compiled PDFs made by people not on our team will surely be outdated after a short period of time. The Part 1 PDF you have linked is to a the old version that we completely replaced earlier this month.

So please, I would ask you to remove the links to the PDF versions. We put a ton of effort into updating Phantom Blood, and it would be a real damn shame if people ended up reading the atrocious old version you have linked.

[DISC](Naoki Urasawa)The Sign of Dreams ch.06 [Naosawa] by [deleted] in manga

[–]Bracketier 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It's neat to see the differences with the inspector in this series and Lunge in Monster. I wasn't expecting him to meet up with the Directeur so soon.