:D Another person from The Netherlands. (I'm from Belgium) You have to pass this test! But you'll have to fix your mistakes first.

You have to save your files as jpg on max quality. It seems your height and p/inch are correct, which is a good thing.

Beelzebub: You forgot to burn all the blacks, like the letters on the vending machine, Oga's hair and the tree. The page is also a little blurry. (Level it slightly more)

BD: Burn the blacks. Needs some more denoising. (Look at the grays in the 5th panel)

DGM: Over denoised, the grays are TOO flat. You lost all the details. =/ You mustn't remove text outside bubbles, typesetters do that.

DD: Same as DGM

FT: Needs more denoising. You cropped it too much, you lost the left white border. Leave the text outside bubbles.

Naruto: Burn all the blacks. You removed the text outside bubbles again :P You don't have to erase the ! from the bubble if it's the only thing in it.

Reborn: Over denoised. The grays are pretty much gone oo'  Also remove the marks of the merge. (top middle) Remove the dust on the whites and bun the blacks.

You either over denoise or under denoise. I suggest you play with your denoise program to find the right settings. You don't want to lose the pattern of the grays. The over denoised pages are all blurry because of it. You should redo all the pages, I don't think you can still fix them.

Good luck on your next try and if you need help, you can always PM me.

Yep, the denoising is tricky to get right. I worked in bad light last night and it seems to show. Gotta work on that.

I always thought cleaners have to do the text outside the bubbles, seemed to me like one of the biggest challenges to get right on this job, but I can see why typesetters should do it. Saves a lot of time at least (especially the D-Gray Man last panel is a bitch :P).

Just curious, is there other stuff I did that I shouldn't do? I like the looks of redrawn borders for niceness and crop the image in such a way that there's no unused white space on the outsides (to grant as much detail to the panels as possible within the 1200px height). Obvious exception is pages like the Beelzebub one. Since you comment on the white border in the FT page, what is the way you like to do it?

I shall put in effort for Dutch pride. :)

Well, just don't crop it off. There was like a 40-50px border on the left. I redraw borders too, if it isn't a speed release or not many pages. You can do what like for the borders.

Heya! Not bad! You still need to burn more blacks and denoise more. I highly recommend Topaz Denoise & Topaz Clean for this. As for burning, everything that isn't obviously supposed to be white or gray should be black. It's ok to get anal with this!

Beelzebub - The dark gray lines on the characters and scenery in the background should be black. Clean up the noise in the sky and around the letters "ASAH" on the side of the vending machine.
BD - burn the blacks on the hat of the character in the far bottom right. Clean up the noisy grays in that panel so they look smooth and nice. Repeat with the bottom left panel.
D.Gray-man - The grays in this look really nice! But burn those blacks on characters' torso in the largest panel, Around the frame that says "D.Gray-man", and on the back wall in the large panel.
DD - the grays are too noisy. Remove the dirt in the grays to make them look smooth and even. Make sure you refer back to the original raw to see what's supposed to be gray and what's supposed to be black. The area under the girl's chin should be gray, not black. Make sure everything that's supposed to be black, like the guy's hair and parts of girl's coat, are SOLID BLACK.
FT - Denoise the grays in the sky to make them nice and smooth. All the texture in the blacks is a result from the newsprint the page was printed on, so make those solid black, like on the old guy's pants, Lucy's dress, Natsu's vest, and Gray's hair.
Naruto - the grays look really good. Darken the blacks on the contraption on panel 4, , the rock lines on panel 1, and the cords on the far left of the last panel.
Reborn - darken the blacks on Hibari's weapon (the spiky thing in the upper left) on the kangaroo's cannon, on the lil lion guy with a hat, and on the lines in the bottom right. The text isn't perfect either, but you don't really have to worry about that since it would be cloned out by typesetters anyway.

I look forward to seeing your next upload!

ee hollander! :D

haha xD that's good though ^^ you'll get the hang of it :D
i'm looking forward to your new try ^^

make sure you get into the team, we need more european people so ikore and i don't have to stay online at rediculous times at night xD our dutch pride will prevail

Ahh smooth and nice! Almost there!

Beelzebub: You've completely gotten rid of the noise, which is great. Awesome job on burning those blacks! Unfortunately, you have overdone it a tad on the denoising. As a result, the lines in the background foliage have changed away from the way they're intended to look. You can fix this by either incorporating some of version 2 back into version 3 to recover lost details, or by redoing the topaz clean with a lower setting on Strength and/or Accent. Also it needs to be sharpened a bit. (Topaz Clean can sometimes make the image a bit blurry, but filter>sharpen fixes that right up.)
BD: Also needs to be sharpened everywhere except the pierced dude. The grays in that box look good and the hat has been burned like I asked. So just sharpen this one and it's done.
DGM: Awesome job on the burning. However, right now I'm actually using a different monitor than I was when I first looked at your previous test, and I can see that some blacks have been missed. If you turn up the brightness setting on your monitor you should be able to see this too. It's on the box in the upper left and on the dude's chest. The person on the box in the lower left has been overburned. He looked fine before, it was just the box that needed burning.
DD - Better, but I'd like it if the grays looked a bit more even. You can do this with Topaz Clean (Cartooned is good for this, but turn the strength down from default) and/or Filter>Blur>Surface Blur. The trick here is to make it more even w/o losing any details. I know this is a tough one! Also the blacks on the guy's mouth and the girl's hand have been lost. You may need to redraw them to get them back. :-o (This is a really good skill to have, btw!)
FT - It's a bit blurry and the black lines have turned gray, so just sharpen it and give the blacks a gentle once-over with the burn tool and I'd say she's good.
Naruto - Good, just sharpen it and it's done. BTW - the grays were fine as is because they didn't look "dirty", they just had the screentone in. Both ways are acceptable as long as they don't look dirty.
Reborn - Great! Now that I'm on a different monitor I see those grays in the bottom right corner Ikore was talking about. So just get rid of that and you're good.

I know from my mass of text this looks like a lot of work, but it's just one or two things per image so hopefully it should be pretty quick. After this if there's no other problems, the next step is to get the OK from the head of the Cleaners, Devilsadvocate101. (If you think I'm anal, wait till you meet him!)

Reborn: very good! Only remove that spot next to gokudera's leg with a white brush.

Naruto: Good.

FT: I don't really like the grays like that. (they lost too many details) And don't crop off the ft logo next time. Overall it's a good page.

DD: Grays the same as FT.

DGM: You forgot to burn some blacks and the gutter shadow isn't completely removed.

BD: Good.

Beelzebub: Good.

Overall it's good. Personally I think you overuse topaz clean to make the grays flat.
Just send a pm to devilsadvocate101 to let him take a look at your application. You might have to send several pm's or you can wait forever xP

I probably misinterpreted your remarks about Beelzebub then, I'm not sure what I missed. Also yes the grays in FT and DD are a little too flat, but what can I say, everything else I tried looked worse. :P I just need some practice with those grays I guess.

Well I sent a PM, we'll see what happens. Also is it just me or do some of you have slightly different standards for cleaning? ;)

Note: I will be away from August 17th until 24th for work (Lowlands should ring a bell with Dutch people) so I'll probably not respond to anything sent during this period for a while.