This is my first translation where I used Photoshop and made sure to do the greyscape/PNG method for exporting as it was suggested a lot. I have also enabled anti-aliasing for my texts.
Thanks, looking much better. Now the only thing left is using the original raw at 2900x4100 ( /g/1625405/a531fa8f8d/ ) instead of the resample at 1280x1800 that aggregators like NH scrape... 😉 TLDR; this site creates lower quality images for gallery display, and aggregators only scrape these ones. As they're saved as 80% quality JPGs, if you zoom in you'll see plenty of compression artifacts. In general to preserve quality it's best to avoid unnecessary rounds of lossy compression like JPG, so using the originals is generally advised. Instead of saving the images from the galleries here or downloading from aggregators like NH, the best option is using the gallery torrents (or if you cannot torrent, the Archive Download function since your past uploads should have already earned you enough gallery points).
Base +25, sunshineandlolipops +28, SilentSnake1995 +9, Zakuzelo +14
I've always tried to do that. Either by torrents or downloading through Archive Download. But somehow the quality always seems to be an issue, not sure why.
Oh and also these were not saved as JPG, I saved them as greyscale PNG files as that was suggested last time.
Yeah, by unnecessary I was referring to the initial save to JPG done by the site for creating the previews, in this case the quality issue is directly related to that. If you download by torrents you should definitely avoid those ending with 1280x because they're for the downscaled version, if you use those you're no better off than downloading from NH.
If you're using the gallery previews you should be seeing compression artifacts zooming in at >300% (look at oblique lines*) before you even start doing anything to your pages. In practice if your images have all a width of exactly 1280 pixels it means you've got the wrong raw. Even if the pages are smaller than 1280x, just to be sure before starting I'd have a look to check if they have too much compression noise...
* P.S: For an example of what to look for – using page 4 of the raw of this doujin – see https://litter.catbox.moe/9qezqc.png (link expires in 3 days). Left is the 1280x resample at 450%, on the right the original at 230%.