Preparing "Kimi ni XOXO" is a Pain in the Butt

"Kimi ni XOXO" is so far the most challenging manga I've ever worked on in terms of image editing.  Here's an example of the mess that lies before me and Sephyna:

Raw:

White Level:

First Leveling:

After cleaning out the text and typesetting:
Cleaning out the text took forever because I had to redraw parts of the image.  This step took about 2-hours...

Final:
I reduced the image to its final size and added various filters to smooth of the print artifacts and to give the page it's final look and feel.  I also did a little editing of the English, and, in the final version, I cut out what I felt was "dead wood" in the Japanese.  As I said earlier, this mangaka is way too verbose, and sometimes those extra words provide no additional meaning (She's in great need of an editor...).

This page took me about 2-1/2 hours to complete! UGH!  And this isn't even the toughest page...We'll see if we can eek this out by the 6th.