How to Handle Speech Bubbles on Halftone Backgrounds in Manga

Handling speech bubbles on halftone backgrounds in manga typesetting

This series records my personal typesetting experience. If you have better methods, feel free to share in the comments.

Problem

In typesetting, we often encounter speech bubbles like this:

How should we handle this kind of bubble?

Solutions

Method 1: Clone Stamp

Pros: quick and convenient, minimal damage to the original image
Cons: not usable in some cases

First, find a repeating area in the halftone. Hold Alt and sample a point far from the text, then move it to the left area until it aligns perfectly.

When you are not proficient at first, lower the stamp hardness. If it does not align, it will look hazy like this:

If it aligns, it will look perfect and obvious. Then paint over the text.

This works if the blank area is large. But if the blank area is small, like the image below, it becomes very hard to paint. At that point, you need to redo the halftone.

Method 2: Recreate the halftone

Pros: versatile, suitable for large text boxes
Cons: time-consuming

Recreating the halftone means drawing the dots again.

First, get halftone material. Find a large halftone area and select a repeating region:

You can see that the top-left and bottom-right blocks are clearly repeating. Select the repeating block (the pink area above), copy and stitch it left and right, and you will see it tiles seamlessly. That means you have a repeating block that you can use as halftone material.

With the material ready, you can redo the halftone. First, select the speech bubble using any method you like: lasso, quick selection, or box selection. I prefer quick selection plus small adjustments with a lasso: