True, but one of the things I loved of Solo Leveling (it's finished, right?) is that some times the colors are AMAZING, like there were some panels where I would just stop and get lost in the art for a bit, while that rarely happened to me with black and white manga. Even when it DID happen with manga, it's literally missing an order of magnitude, so IMHO peak manga B&W can barely compare with peak full-color art (and I'm not even saying Solo Leveling is top-level color art, what I'm saying is that it's "very good" and with that it beats "top level" B&W any day IMHO).

I cant disagree that color art has dimensions to it that black and white (and halftones) can’t quite reach.

But to say that color alone makes it better than greyscale… No, I can not agree with that. A matter of taste? Perhaps. But there is some absurdly beautiful art in Manga too.

Starkness, working within constraints, has its own beauty.

And, as an aside, full color manga is becoming a thing too. More and more full color webtoon style comics are coming from Japan; from mangaka.

I'm not saying that color alone makes it better than greyscale, that'd be absurd. What I'm saying is that for the same "percentile of quality", color wins pretty much always.

Since full-color as a set technically includes the B&W set (and in the case on point of Solo Leveling, there are some scenes that are notably impressive while being mostly B&W! or grayscale with a shadow hint in other color) then it's a truism that full-color reaches to heights that B&W can never reach.

An author known for her detail is Kaoru Mori. Her art is really beautiful. And while it’s Josei I think it’s appealing to those outside the usual demographic. It is much better than any webtoon where most suffer from samesie character design.

I suspect you only say this because you read on your phone. The true strength of black-and-white illustration is in being able to see how individual pen strokes have contributed to the feel of the final image. To do this properly you really need a physically large image (and the artist to have started with the intention of producing a physically large image). I didn't think Naoko Takeuchi was that great of an artist until I read the Eternal edition of her magnum opus, and the difference is night and day.

Halftones, delicate hatching and thin lines all turn to mush when anti-aliased, so they just won't show up in a medium optimised for grabbing the attention of the infinite-scrolling phone-reader with thumbnail-sized images.

Are there any particular tools of the trade for scanlations, or does everyone use Photoshop/GIMP and call it a day?

Primarily Photoshop for scanlation. Official workflows will use a combination of Photoshop for retouching and InDesign for lettering/prepress

Yup, photoshop almost exclusively for the redrawers and typesetters, and plain ol' text documents (with some "this line goes on this page in this bubble" shorthand) for translators and proofreaders.

Gimp, sadly, does not really work, since it doesn't represent .psd files the same way photoshop does. It's easier to sail the high seas than it is to get a Gimp workflow working. :(

Thank you for your work.

It's fun (well, when you're working on one you enjoy), and there's plenty of need. If you're on Mangadex, just look for the requests teams are making as part of their headers or footers in scanlated chapters. It's how I found my way in.

Proofreaders in scanlation are basically touching up the translations to make them read well in English (tenses and idioms that don't always translate well), as well as checking for consistency between chapters in tone and spelling.