I read a few messages, hoping better scans for this series get uploaded. If anyone wants to take this off of my hands please send me a DM or comment on this gallery so I don't snipe a gallery. For now, I'm going to keep working on this series until someone else wants to start work on it or he stops with the Gilbert pairing.

Is Mutou Keiji stuck on a SAO timeloop or something?

Base +6, katiga -3, Lurker31 +7, retrospectrum +8, Viper_12358 +6

finally i needed this now waiting for the English translation

Base +10, katiga -3

https://ec.toranoana.jp/tora_r/ec/item/040031179795/

Base +22, abdd +15, Viper_12358 +6

ah yes. the hentai version of "once you go black"

Base +6

Will work on English translation soon, thanks as always Devildie.
Having you procuring books directly from Comiket and scanning them all this quickly is already invaluable to the community, so it takes really special kind of person to complain about that.
In fact as a editor, I do prefer the lightly processed RAW like the ones you did in Astral Bout 45 & 46 to work with.
My only feedback for the recent, leveled ones if I have to, would be that the shadows are clipped a bit too much to the right so there are some crushed blacks/looks dark but it's nothing that the Photoshop couldn't fix or gloss over so it's a non-issue really for any decent editors out there.

Whatever decision you'll take, I'll respect that, and thanks for all the efforts you've done this far for this series.

Base +20, skatlads15 +6

@decidua
Thanks for the input. I will be rescanning this and uploading a unleveled version on mega by tomorrow in the afternoon PST so you have something better to work with. ( ' 3')b

Oh ya, that's an excellent job. I actually should start doing that with the sample images. That's actually a huge tip I never thought of doing. I really appreciate it. I'll keep in mind for any future releases of my galleries :o

Also, thank you for your concern!

Last edited on 24 August 2024, 20:40.

Base +15, skatlads15 +6

@devildie
Whoa, thanks a lot man... But I really mean it when you don't have to do that, these pages are more than good enough for me. Here's what I've got up to so far:
https://mega.nz/folder/4jZiFYiR#0biu912j5TiMwA-uAGz7ng
I'd rather not take any more of your cozy weekend time when you've been uploading all these free doujin for more than a decade.

I dunno if this would pass as a tip, but the way I try to get an idea of how the artist wants these pages to look digitally is mostly by downloading all the free sample images from the artist's socials or store links (For Astral Bout 48: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/121147610 ).
And then putting them side by side to get the quick & rough idea for the histogram setting, but doing so is already going above & beyond than what raw scanners normally does.

For more in depth tuning, in case you're curious with my workflow, I'd sample the shading the artist used that will be consistent throughout the book.
Like in Astral Bout 48, these black/gray values in all the free samples are the same so I can assume that they will be for the other pages:
- Asuna's skin shadow is roughly 80% gray
- Asuna's hair will be 70% gray
- Asuna's hair shadow & Agil's skin are 50% gray
- Agil's skin shadow is 27-30% gray

So all I need to do is just tweak the histogram curve until I get the setting that has these values for those areas, do the other raws cleaning processes if needed, and then double check if I can apply the curve setting to the other pages as well before batch processing them.

Base +20, skatlads15 +6