Image Capture — Scanning
Capturing a good quality image is one of the most important factors to consider when reproducing an original piece of artwork. If this goes wrong, it’s a lot of hard work to recover the image to produce a good quality print.
The ideal option is to scan your artwork using a flatbed scanner. With the most basic of home scanners you should be able to capture a sharp, high resolution image without any distortion. The colour accuracy of the digital image you capture might vary though, the better the scanner - the better the image it will produce. A4 scanners are very popular, A3 scanners are available but they are a lot more expensive, so if you produce larger artworks — photography may be a better option. More on photography later.
Settings
There are many different brands of scanner available, each with its own software, consequently it’s impossible to detail settings from all these different scanners and applications. The settings below are common to most scanners available;
Document Type Home scanners are used to scan one of two types of image, either a document containing lots of text, or a photograph. Artwork is rarely catered for, so select Photo. Document tries to enhance text by adding lots of contrast, this will lighten white/light areas (the paper background) and darken/strengthen the content within the page - compare the two images below, the first has been scanned with a photo setting and the second has been adjusted to mimic a document setting, notice the subtle pencil lines have been lost to the increased contrast.
Colour / Image Type This setting will define the type of image that you create and specifically if it is saved colour or greyscale (black and white). Within most scanning software, you’ll be presented with multiple options for colour, including 8bit, 16bit — and maybe even higher — 8bit is the most common for images, it will contain plenty of colour information for your image and it’s fine for screen images, but you’re going to be printing, so create your images as 16bit Colour. Even if you’re scanning a black and white piece of artwork, use the colour setting. A higher colour depth will create a larger image file, but this should not put you off choosing 16bit for your images.
Resolution / DPI A hugely important factor, like most points in this tutorial, I’ll talk about resolution and DPI later, but for now, the take away is that you want a high resolution so you have plenty of pixels for your printer to produce a high quality print from your capture. Most home scanners will advertise optical resolutions of 2400dpi or even 4800dpi, you won’t need as high as this. The general rule is at least 300dpi, ideally 600dpi, and if you’re going to want prints larger than your original, aim to scan at 1200dpi. Like choosing 16bit colour as apposed to 8bit colour, a higher resolution will create a larger file - but it will be worth it.
Colour Adjustments Many scanners will have the ability to read an image and determine the correct colour balance for the image, some will also be able to remove unwanted colour casting - such as sepia from old photographs (sometimes referred to as Colour Restoration). When scanning your artwork, I would recommend having a look through the adjustment settings, capturing multiple scans with different settings applied and then choose one that you feel gives the closest onscreen match to your original artwork. A couple of things to look out for though; make sure whites and highlights are not getting bleached out, and darker areas and shadows are not blocking or being turned to black.
Other settings within adjustments will normally include;
Sharpening This will make the scanner sharpen any outlines within your artwork, I would recommend switching this off or using a low setting only, you can sharpen the image at a later date using an image editing application and have much more control with how your image is sharpened at the same time.
Descreen This is something very specific, descreening is used to remove print patterns from magazine and newspaper images, these would have been printed using half tone dots to create the illusion of many colours. When scanned, they create a Moiré pattern, descreening is a way of removing this pattern. You will not need this setting on when scanning your artwork.
File Type Once you’re happy with all the above settings, you’re ready to scan and capture your image. You will either need to choose the file type before you hit the big “Scan” button, or after you hit the big “Scan” button, in either case though you’ll have a variety of options. Again, I’ll explain file types in a future tutorial. The best file format for images is an uncompressed Tiff (Tagged Image File Format), this will give you the highest quality file and one that can be used in the greatest number of places.
Extra Tips
A few extra pointers when scanning your artwork;
Make sure your artwork is completely flat to the scanner’s glass. A scanner has an incredibly narrow focal point, if an area of your artwork is slightly lifted away from the glass, it will be out of focus and result in a blurry capture. If your original is not complete flat, use a heavy book to help flatten your artwork, covers on most scanners are not heavy enough to do this for you.
Make sure your original is straight. Scanning a wonky image will mean an unnecessary edit and rotation in the future, these sorts of edits will reduce the sharpness of your image.
That’s it for scanning, a brief introduction but hopefully enough to get you started. In the next tutorial, I’ll detail tips to help deal with textured artwork and artwork larger than your flatbed scanner.