“Release That Watermark!” project

I recently stumbled upon some ugly watermarks while reading “Release That Witch!”. It triggered my anger. I felt an urge to find the same watermark on a white background elsewhere, start my Python IDE and try and see to what extent I could restore the original quality of the raws before they were watermarked.

My first attempt was promising, and the watermark’s visibility decreased, but it was far from satisfying. So I resorted my most powerful tools: sheets of paper, pencils, and a comfortable place to think.
Then, I could little by little upgrade my Python scripts, and results got clearly better.

Although I cannot boast 100% watermark removal (especially if the raws underwent JPEG compression, which creates losses of quality), watermarks can be made significantly less visible, and such an processing could be a useful tool for cleaners/redrawers.

I think the quality of my scripts is already good enough to start sharing them at the scale of the scanlation community (although they can be used for other purposes than cleaning raws).

That’s why I’ve created a little watermark manipulation toolkit, named “Release That Watermark!”. It will very likely evolve. I have no doubts there are be bugs to fix, lacks of convenience to deal with, more documentation to write, and perhaps sometimes even core ideas to improve. New techniques might also be created to extract & remove watermarks.

It is possible that I’ll also create standalone exectutables for Windows, so a double-click will be enough to open the program (and getting Python won’t be necessary anymore). Although I do not currently intend to create executables for other operating systems, I’ll provide the source code and a nice license for anyone to do so (and to create forks and/or derived works).

For now, here is a link to get the watermark manipulation toolkit:
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/qkxpmudgvszm4/ReleaseThatWatermark!