How to fix washed-out manga and improve contrast on Kindle

A manga volume can look black and sharp on your computer monitor, then gray on your Kindle, with shading tones that run together and small text that's hard to read.

Here's why e-ink makes pages look washed out, and how to fix it.

How e-ink shows black

E-readers like the Kindle and Kobo do not have backlights that shine through an LCD panel. Instead, they use physical micro-capsules filled with black and white pigment.

When you turn a page, an electrical charge moves the black pigment to the surface to form the image. Because you are looking at physical pigment (and not a glowing OLED pixel), the contrast ratio is significantly lower. "Black" on a Kindle is actually a dark gray. "White" is a light gray.

The scanned image problem

Manga is drawn in high-contrast black ink. But when a physical book is scanned (or when a digital file is compressed for the web), "noise" is introduced. A pixel that should be pure black (#000000) becomes very dark gray (#222222).

On a computer screen, your eyes barely notice this difference because the bright backlight compensates for it. On an e-ink screen, which already has less contrast, that #222222 pixel shows as a lighter gray, and the page looks faded.

Fixing it by hand

To fix it yourself:

1. Unzip the manga file.
2. Run a batch script in Photoshop or ImageMagick to adjust the Levels or Curves.
3. Apply an Unsharp Mask to define the line art.
4. Repackage everything into an EPUB via KCC.

It takes practice with image tools to get right, and time for every volume. KCC also applies an automatic contrast adjustment and has a gamma setting, which is enough for many files.

MangaSendr's Enhance Contrast setting

MangaSendr has an Enhance Contrast setting for this.

When you upload a file to MangaSendr, every page is processed before the EPUB is built:

1. Enhance Contrast: This setting is on by default (in Settings, under Preferences). On black-and-white Kindles, MangaSendr boosts the contrast of every page. Dark grays are pushed toward black and light grays toward white, so faded ink reads bolder on e-ink.
2. Grayscale for e-ink: For black-and-white Kindles, each page is converted to grayscale before it's sent, which also keeps the file smaller.
3. Sized for your screen: Each page is resized for the Kindle model you picked at setup, and plain white margins are trimmed so the artwork is as large as it can be.

On a faded scan, the difference is easy to see: line art looks darker and small text is easier to read. It can't rescue a scan that is blurry or low resolution to begin with, and MangaSendr doesn't sharpen line art or smooth out banding in screentones. If you need that level of control, the manual Levels, Curves and sharpening route above is still the way to go.

See the before & after

The easiest way to judge is with a volume you already know looks faded on your Kindle. Send it through MangaSendr with Enhance Contrast on (the default), then compare the two copies page by page.

Your first delivery is free. Pricing covers what's included after that.