Pinandhita 論理型

22.10 Seinaru Sono ni wa Bonyuu ga Saku

5 min read

聖なる園には母乳が咲く

[Itonouri (hemachi)] Seinaru Sono ni wa Bonyuu ga Saku | A Fertile Bosom Blooms in this Holy Garden (Blue Archive) [English] [Pinandhita 論理型]

Mangadex link: -

Exh link: https://exhentai.org/g/3231081/2ab06b6ddf/

Previews are English-only.

Commentary

This translation was commissioned by Anonymous.

MIKA MILKIESSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!! I would fucking love to drink Mikamilk. Shame that there’s no breastfeeding scene in this book. After consuming weekly Mika dose through the Sensei, can we talk a little bit? Shorts series, my image of Mika in this book is becoming more vivid.

Now, the technical stuffs.

Since this was a commission, I felt that giving a below subpar pages is unnacceptable, and thought of upscaling the pages’ resolution, with the side effects of (hopefully) improving the scans’ quality. Thankfully the guy accepts my proposal, “as long as it looks good.”

And so I depart to seek the “best” image upscaler tech that I could access.

waifu2x was the first thing that I thought of, but uploading the images one by one to the website is a pain, regardless of which waifu2x site you go. Adding to that was the fact that they acknowledged how waifu2x is left behind in the march of image upscaling technology and research, citing how many other image upscaler existed right now, and that they offered better results compared to waifu2x. So I seek for other options.

There exists some sites that offered free image upscale that is specifically for anime images, but the results are hit or miss for doujinshi pages. I do note one of them market themselves as “manga image upscale,” with option to upload multiple pages among other thing, but: 1) they only support black and white pages (feeding a color page, like cover page for example, will result in it being converted into bw image), and 2) they fucking paywalled that shit after 4 or 5 pages in. Nothing is free and good at the same time, I suppose.

And then I stumbled upon Real-ESR.

Description from the project's website

Real-ESRGAN aims at developing Practical Algorithms for General Image/Video Restoration. We extend the powerful ESRGAN to a practical restoration application (namely, Real-ESRGAN), which is trained with pure synthetic data.

The demo page where you can upload anime image and upscale them (but not download it, I think, or at least I don’t) shows promise. And also, it runs locally in your machine! So I chose to use it.

Huge thanks to incstbst for helping me with upscaling this, since my machine was not good enough to use it. They sent me two upscaled version, one using RealESRGAN_x4plus model and the other with AnimeVideo-v3 model, the apparent difference being AnimeVideo-v3’s size are almost double the other.

I ended up using AnimeVideo-v3 model’s since x4plus have some issues in filling gradation. See below (x4plus on the left, AnimeVideo-v3 on the right):

But still, even after using AI upscaler like this, which also offers artifacts removal, it still is present on the images, to a certain extent. Since at pixel level the AI by itself can’t detect what is scans artifact and what’s not, it also got uspcaled as well. Viewing the pages at a glance, there doesn’t seem to be any problems, but the pages are filled with shitton of pixel variation, even on the dark parts. Even after properly levelled, it’s still there. Level your pages, kiddo.

For example, here’s a random zoom in of 800% from the same page above:

This is the reason the file size are so huge- those variations are saved in the image uncompressed. pngquant only able to compress the bits to roughly 55-60% of the original size, though, which is enough for me.

Also, the pages are upscaled to 4x, which I later descaled to only 2x since the dpi/ppi aren’t that small; it’s just wasting disk space, considering it’s only an upscale rather than hi-res raws.

That said, the upscale and noise removal are much more noticeable in colored image. The cover are so much nicer to look compared to the original.

Would I recommend doing this? Ehh, not really. It’s not really a substitution to the more important process of scanlating, which is levelling. But it does makes shitty page become more smooth, if I were to describe it, almost but not exactly at hi-res raws-tier, digital or scans.

Remember, level your pages, kiddo. This step will make your manga pages so, so much nicer to look at, especially for scans of lower quality. This book is properly levelled, ofc. I’ll probably write a page levelling guide someday, considering that the guide for image prepping in scanlation are already quite old.

Source

Support the author by buying the original doujinshi from official raws linked below.

Credits

  • Translator: Shirayuri
  • Proofreader: Thea
  • Cleaner & Redrawer: Thea
  • Typesetter: Thea
  • Quality Checker: ADX_LMJ

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