The way I decensor hentai mangas

I am regularly asked how I decensor hentai mangas. By email, at least once per week. In the comments, at least twice per week. So, well, I may as well write it once for all and avoid making a copy and paste very time

First of all, a very important notice : I am NOT talented with picture editing even if, as a hard worker, I’ve come across quite a few ways to achieve functional results, and it is obvious there are several better ways of uncensoring hentai mangas. Professionals make it better . I simply share the way I do it, knowing it is not of very good advice, and you definitely can do better with enough training or with better tutorials.

OK, now that it is settled, let’s explain my method. All advice and comments to help making it better will be welcome, and if YOU successfully decensor something, you’d better share it with everyone as fast as possible

Before we begin the most important remark : decensoring a picture is, fundamentally, a convincing lie, not the restoration of a lost picture state. Missing information (pixels color and position), once it is lost, cannot be recovered, decensoring is something different. Decensoring is different, it is the construction of an alternative solution that might be the right one, an alternative solution that will cheat the eye, that will look convincing, and that will be accepted as being true. Only the original drawer could accurately restore missing information, not us – us, we have to build a convincing lie.

No special software is needed, just a good picture editing program. I reckon photoshop is by far the best, however I never managed to get the hang of this program, I have no affinity with its menus or with the way it works. Personally, I’m a user of The Gimp, I had almost immediate affinity with the way that program works, and I’ve been now working with it (in real life) for almost five years. Alternatively, you could use Corel Paint Shop Pro, I guess.

There are two ways of decensoring :
– method 1, the best : you’re very good at drawing and you have good anatomic knoweledge, you have a graphical palette, you manually redraw the missing shapes and fill in the blanks
– method 2, my method unfortunately : I have no drawing notions, low anatomic knoweledge, and only a mouse.
In that second case, I guess what are the missing shapes and zones, and, with the neighbouring elements, using these elements, extending and copying-and-manipulating-and-pasting them, I do my best to reconstruct the censored zone.
Of course, if a censored zone is not entirely blackened but simply grayed, it’s much easier, it’s back to the roots, using the neighbouring elements, after you copied and manipulated them, to fill in the censored zone.

And that’s it : you guess the forms to first reconstruct the shapes before reconstructing the surfaces, and you copy, transform, paste and move a copy of the surrounding zones to reconstruct the missing parts.

The manipulations I use most of the time :

– select something with the free hand selection tool, copy and paste it. You may test what’s the best settings for the free hand selection, the Gimp allows you two settings for the free hand selection, to soften the borders or even smoothen them, you’d better do it indeed unless you want the copied and pasted zone to have ugly sharp borders (I don’t know the proper english words, but try for youself you’ll see the difference).
Something you have copied and pasted will be movable when you click it and drag and drop it.

– extending lines and shapes : I copy the end of a line, control c, control v, and I paste it in the continuation of a censored line. Gimp’s Deform tool can adjust a bit the thickness of a line, be wary of ugly results.

– rotating elements : the lines in curbs can’t be extended in a straight line, can they ? Watch out, with the Gimp, the more you rotate an element the more blurred it becomes (does Photoshop also have this problem, I wonder).

– paste in a new window, and copy-paste it back to the original picture. That allows to freely do everything you want on a selection without running the risk of affecting the whole picture by accident

– create layers and affect various elements to layers : I leave it to confirmed users, I won’t advice a beginner to use layers when there’s already a zillion other things to learn first.

– adjust levels in darkened zones : for zones where the pixels haven’t been suppressed, but only darkened. Warning : the operation “kills” some pixels, so don’t overdo it even if you need to manually make the finishing touch afterwards. You draw a selection with the Paths tool (its precise functioning may vary with the version of the program you use, so the general idea is : you draw a zone clicking a point after clicking another point, these points are linked with each other, and at the end you click the “create a selection from this path” button, or whatever this button is called). Then you adjust the levels in that zone, play with the settings, but better adjust a bit two settings rather than ajust a lot one single setting, this would cause more pixels loss). The borders of a zone where you adjusted levels are often uglily deformed, you’ll have to copy-paste parts from the non-adjusted neighbouring area to hide it. That’s something you must try for yourself to learn how to make it well.

…
And that’s it, the rest is a matter of training and seeing for yourself :o

My method, I’ll write it again, is barely functional, far from being good, and there are many better ways to decensor hentai mangas (even if I don’t know them).
An example to show my method sucks and you’d better find out yourself how to decensor better : I completely fail with color or grayscale shaded off zones, that makes my usual zone extension, rotation, levels correction, pixel push and copy and paste methods completely useless.

I’m done, two conclusions :
– please, if you know how to do better, I will accept advice and tutorials with gratitude
– if you were encouraged enough to start your own decensorings and you think you’ve done well, why not share it with everyone in the community, so that in the end there is more uncensored hentai for everyone ? Send me your decensorings if you like, or share them anywhere you want, but don’t keep your uncensored hentai for yourself, the more for everyone, the better in the end