Update: editor said this PhotoShop setting should produce a superior version, who am I to disagree



translator: ultimaflaral
proofreading: ultimaflaral
editor: baha815
QC: ultimaflaral
raw: https://e-hentai.org/g/216691/869bdc9af7 (share by nonygoo, scanner ?)

If you want to see more Black Lagooncontent support bounties
https://e-hentai.org/bounty.php?search=Lagoon&t=&s=

Red's rant: Join the BL fanclub. You know you want to.

Ulti said: Another fine pick from Red_Piotrus. A fairly hilarious collection of somewhat random stories set in the Black Lagoon universe. Balalaika and Chang, married and suffering domestic strife? Sawyer with a dick? Lotton the teetotaler? The fun never stops!

E-hentai tip of the gallery:

14) Do you have a few spare bucks? It's easy to move from leecher to sharer. If you have a credit card you can acquire digital dojins and CG sets from http://www.dlsite.com/ecchi-eng/ DLsite (they have a decent English version). You can use doujinrepublic to look for paper books, they too have a good English page, but they have high commissions, so it is best to use them to simply confirm the book is offered somewhere, then get a better deal using Japanese sites like suruga-ya, melonbooks or toranoana.jp which is where the doujinrepublic orders stuff from anyway :> If that sounds like a hassle, or you don't have a scanner device, you can use PayPal to commission a scan with an experienced scanner. Quite a few offer their services in our forums; I've personally commissioned scans with 8055 Scanning, The Tsukuyomi, Kalevala Scans and Super Shanko, and many others in the forum have a good reputation too. So how about giving something back to the community?

Ads:

We are always recruiting editors, translators, and proofreaders for EHCOVE. If you are interested, come by the Cove of Translators in the forums and introduce yourself. We also accept credit and hath donations (PM me for how to support us!).

(taking page 6 as an example) This version: JPG 98% quality, true color w/ subsampling off
Previous version: PNG, 17-entry palette (and the images –like in this gallery– hadn't been grayscaled so all the 17 entries were off-grays).

Well your editor is right as there's no longer extraneous dithering, but I want to point out that the format used in the previous version was only problematic because the images hadn't been leveled all the way*. Had they been, then the blacks would've been black and the whites white, and so the only dithering in the final images would have been that of the original screentones.
Personally I'd have gone with grayscale PNGs and run them through PNGcrush or a similar optimizer, and likely the files sizes would have been smaller and with no added compression noise (JPG is a lossy format, at 98% quality the added noise is little but there nonetheless). As it is now the gallery likely takes up more disk space than it needs to, but it's probably not worth it doing a third version.

* difficult to do without grayscaling beforehand - BTW just because the original scanner couldn't be arsed to output grayscale images for obviously B/W pages I see no reason to perpetuate its error.

Edit: Just ran a batch edit of Grayscale + Edge Preserving Smooth @min setting (to get rid of some JPG artifacts) + Histogram Adjustment (low clip 65, high clip 248, gamma 1.2 if you're interested), saved as PNG grayscale and unleashed PNGcrush on the results. The resulting set is way smaller than this gallery (29.9 MB, of which 11 MB are for the huge-ass credit page) and IMO it looks better.
It's at https://e-hentai.org/g/1905838/e1ba3aa137/ if you want to see it. I'd publish it but it's against da rulez...

Last edited on 08 May 2021, 01:42.

Base +25, Red of EHCOVE +60, baha815 +12