@davidgraham212121
They run their pages through digital upscaling, likely waifu2x, since that's one of the best and the most accessible right now. The problem with this is that these upscalers are trained using datasets that
aren't manga. But what exactly makes manga so special that these upscalers can't be used on it? Screentones. Manga heavily makes use of these to simulate shades and textures, which is very much unlike how modern anime does things where they're simple smooth colors for most of the picture. The end results of using a neural network that was trained using anime is that these screentones are obliterated and you're left with a smooth and lifeless picture.
The above was taken from our releases of chapter 10 with ours on the left and theirs on the right. Their uniform is made out of screentones and you can see that it was the patterns were smoothed around and jumbled because the upscaler thought it was handling an anime image. If you value the manga author's work at all, then this should be an abomination to you. As a side note, waifu was trained using images and not text and you can see in the same image that the Amaguri Handymen label was also destroyed. This is very likely why TOOR redraws all the non-bubbled text in their releases: because their upscaler destroys them.
Another thing is that upscalers aren't miracle workers. If the source is bad, then the upscale will be bad too. If the detail it's working on are small, then the resulting upscale will be blurry as hell because it can't add detail where there isn't.
If the source has aliasing on top of that, then the result will still have aliasing despite that being one of the main things an upscaler aims to remove.
"Why not just sharpen?" then, you might ask. Well, I'm sad to say that the digital raws of the manga are simply so bad that we can't really do anything with it. Any form of sharpening, mild or selective, either ruins the image or exaggerates the low quality.
@jesusworegucci If by editing you mean redraws and whatnot, have a look here (order goes raw, ours, theirs)
In the first one, you can see they drew some weird black line down the right side of her hair. In the second near the “What do I do" line, between their image upscaling and rewdrawing, you end up with that weird grey splotch thing. If you’re just referring to image upscaling and not redrawing, In the third, there's some really funky stuff going on with her hair tie. Our redraws aren't perfect but we put much effort into them and make sure they don't stand out.
Edit: I suck at BBcode. I think it's good now.