Translation workflow

Lumina automates the five stages of page translation, but treats automation as a starting point rather than a final answer. Every stage produces editable results, and a light human pass is expected to polish the output.

Import → Detect → OCR → Translate → Inpaint → Typeset → Export
                    └──────── every step stays editable ────────┘

1. Text detection

Detection finds text boxes and speech bubbles on each page and hands them to the next stages.

• The default detector, rtdetr, produces fast, accurate boxes and is Apache-2.0 licensed.
• rfdetr_seg is a segmentation-based detector that also outputs masks, which enables the automatic full-page inpaint mask. It is trained on Manga109 and is restricted to academic, non-commercial research use.

Editing: detected boxes can be re-ordered, corrected, or drawn by hand with the selection tools before running OCR.

2. OCR

OCR reads the text inside each detected region. Lumina bundles several engines:

• baberu — multilingual (Japanese / Chinese / English), tuned for manga speech bubbles. The recommended default.
• manga-ocr — Japanese-focused; handles vertical, horizontal, stylized, and even handwritten text, and is lightweight.
• ppocrv6 — very fast on CPU and covers 50+ languages, but is weaker on rotated or skewed text.
• paddleocr_vl — a vision-language model, strongest on Chinese/English; slower and still in development.

Editing: OCR text can be edited line by line or re-translated individually.

3. Translation

Translation is the only stage that calls an external AI API — everything else runs fully offline. Configure a provider and target language in Settings → Translation, then run translation per page.

Editing: each line can be edited, re-translated, or excluded. An angle detector (anglenet) measures the slant of the original text so typeset text can be rotated to match.

Read the Translation settings guide for providers, API keys, and custom instructions.

4. Inpainting

Inpainting erases the original text from the page. With a segmentation detector, Lumina generates a full-page mask automatically; otherwise it falls back to a heuristic (Otsu) mask inside each detected box.

Editing: inpaint masks are individual layers — toggle, move, or remove them before exporting. A cleanup brush lets you paint additional areas that need erasing by hand.

5. Typesetting

Typesetting places the translated text back on the page:

• Auto-detected text color and slant from the original
• Auto-fit fonts to keep text inside its bubble or box
• Per-layer typography controls (font family, size, weight, style, rotation)
• A full-page paint layer for manual cleanup work

Editing: every typeset layer stays editable. The text tool, brush, eraser, bucket, and eyedropper give you full control over the final look.

Export

Use the Export dialog to flatten pages to PNG or JPG. You can re-order pages there (this only affects export order, never your working project) and export just the active page or the whole project. See Projects & export.