Hello everyone!

It's been ages since I wrote one of these Artips journals...! Life's been busy... but now we're back on tracks and ready to cover a new topic.
I know that I said that the next issue would be on Planning and composing a picture, and it's already half-written, but I need to do some more research on good tutorials, so I figured we could switch to this issue first. Planning and composing will be the topic for the next Artips journal.

The previous issues of Artips:

[Artips #1] Why you *do* have talent
[Artips #2] Originality and personal style




Artips #3 - Scanning and post-editing traditional artwork


How I transfer my artwork into digital format is, surprisingly, one of the questions I get asked most often. Many beginners don't know how to do this properly, while it's obviously a very important part of displaying your artwork online...! I'll cover how I do this using a scanner here, with my personal little tips.

I won't explain how to do this using a camera, because I don't know how to do this very well. It takes to have a good camera, a tripod, a dedicated space to shoot your artwork with proper lighting and exposure, and I never managed to get good results with a camera... scanning is, I think, much easier.

Don't hesitate to share your own tips... the more the merrier!



Materials


Obviously, to scan your artwork, you'll need... a scanner.

What type of scanner should you use? Well, as almost always... it depends on what you want to do. Professional scanners give the best results, BUT they're expensive. Is it worth the investment? Let's be clear, if you're learning how to properly scan your artwork now, you don't need a professional scanner. If you needed one, you'd know it.

At the moment, I use a five-year-old Epson combined printer/scanner to scan my artwork. The general idea is... you can get very good, print-quality results even with a fairly cheap home scanner. I am considering to upgrade to a better scanner someday soon, when I'll have the money, because mine is growing old and is not perfect at picking very light colors, but honestly... I've done and am still doing just fine with my good old scanner.

Another question is the size of your scanner. Mine is a regular A4. Basically... A4 scanners are cheap. A3 scanners used to be excruciatingly expensive, they're becoming more affordable, but they remain bulky. So that's up to you. If you do a lot of pictures larger than A4, you might find a A3 scanner to save you a lot of annoyance. But it's very possible to scan artwork larger than A4 with a A4 scanner, as I'll explain later.



Tuning your scanner settings


So, you've made this awesome new picture and you can't wait showing it to the world! But you need to scan it first... and before that, you need to make sure your scanner is on the right settings.

Your scanner should have a driver with a window that looks more or less like this :



There are a number of options you must tune to get the best results :

+ Document Type : this does not exist on all scanners, but if it does, you'll usually want to use "Photography", or something like this. I have an "Illustration" setting, but I found it gives poorer results than "Photography"... so you'll need to try and see what works best on your device. Never "Text" or "Draft" or anything not meant for high-quality pictures, obviously.

+ Colors : Depending on your work, you'll be using "Colors" or "Levels of grey". "Black & White" might work for some ink line works, but I've always found it gave oddly edgy lines... When scanning a B&W work, "Levels of grey" usually works best, as "Colors" might introduce a slight hue to your picture (green/blue on most scanners).

+ File type : This is very important! Most scanners will scan as JPEG by default. You DON'T want to scan your artwork as a JPEG file. Set this on TIFF. Why is that? Well, JPEG is a compressed file, even when you set the compression level to very, very low. Compressed files tend to loose information when they are moved around on your hard drive by your computer, which happens all the time, and they age. So your files might look good when you've just scanned them... but when you open them again three or four years later, you'll find that some parts have become slightly pixelated, or that the colors have shifted at the edges of color areas... This has happened to me, and I've lost the print files for pictures I drew years ago and whose originals I no longer own. Very, very frustrating. This won't happen with TIFF files, which are heavier but not compressed and will not loose information.

+ Resolution : Another very important point! If you're planning to maybe print the artwork someday, you'll need to set this on 300 dpi minimum. "Dpi" stands for "dot per inch": so the number is how many pixels the scanner will pick on one inch of your picture. The higher it is, the finer the resolution of your scan is, and the heavier your file is, obviously. In order to print your picture properly, you need a resolution of 300 dpi, so scanning at 300 dpi allows you to print your artwork in life size. Scanning at 600 dpi allows you to make finer resolution prints in life size, but it will also allow you to make nice prints twice as big as your original. And so on. I usually scan at 600 dpi or higher, just in case...

If you're not planning to make prints, just to display the pictures on a screen, 72 or 96 dpi is usually enough.

I'd advice not to tweak the brightness/contrast and colors settings on your scanner, unless you have a calibration device to *really* calibrate the scanner. I won't get into the details of calibrating a scanner with ICC profiles and stuff, because I'm really no expert and that's too advanced for the scope of this tutorial.

Most drivers will allow you to save those settings into a custom profile, so that you won't have to reset your settings everytime you scan a picture.



Scanning your picture!


Okay! So now your scanner is ready to rock, and so are you.
I'll start with the easy case, when your artwork is small enough to fit inside the scanner. I'll explain how to scan something larger afterwards.

So, hum, that's really basic here. Put your artwork inside the scanner. Make sure the edges are well-aligned with the borders of your scanner, to avoid hair-pulling when you'll find out your vertical lines are sliiiightly not vertical. Close the lid if you can (for thick drawing pads, canvas, woodblocks or such, don't bother with the lid, but make sure you take a preview shot and restrain the scanning area to your picture, or the scanner will go nuts because of all the light on the edges), and click on "Scan" in the scanner driver. A little tip: press very hard with both hands on the lid while the scanner scans, so that the picture will lay very flat against the glass, and so that there's no space between the paper and the lid (which can result in darker areas in the scan). Save your file. You're on the right track!



The not-so-funny case of large artworks


Scanning artworks larger than your scanner is infuriating the first time you do it. After a while, you'll get the hook on it, and it gets easier... but it still requires a bit of patience and know-how. Basically you'll need to scan your artwork in several parts, and then stitch them together using a drawing software just as Photoshop or The Gimp.
Be careful, this won't work for anything but drawings/paintings on paper, because you'll need to bend your artwork a little.
So, scan your artwork in as many parts as necessary to cover the whole picture. Just make sure of a few things:

+ anytime you scan a part, make sure one edge of the picture is perfectly aligned against the edge of the scanner, or it will be a nightmare to fit the different parts together.

+ anytime you scan a part, there will be about one-two inches that will come out blurry and dark on the edges where the picture sticks out of the scanner. So make sure your different parts have a fairly large overlap.

+ DON'T change anything in the scanner settings between two parts, and don't turn it off! No "auto-exposure, "auto-brightness", no nothing! Or the colors will come out differently in the different parts and it will be very hard to get a good result. If two parts are really different in color or exposure, it means that something went wrong when you scanned (the settings changed somewhere, somehow, probably because you have some kind of "automatic exposure" setting switched on).

+ Be careful when you close/press the scanner lid not to damage your picture, obviously. Pressing on the scanner lid helps getting a better scan, since the lid will not close well as the picture is sticking out... but make sure you don't crease your paper.


Once you have the different parts, open them in your software of choice. There are softwares for panoramic landscapes that will automatically fit the different parts together, but I've never found a free one that doesn't paste an ugly watermark in the middle of your picture. So I do this in Photoshop - but any other drawing software (The Gimp, OpenCanvas, etc) will do, I think. Create a new document a bit larger than your original picture. In each scan, select and copy a part of the picture as large as you can, but without the blurry areas on the edges. Paste it in your new document. Each part should have been automatically pasted in a separate layer, which makes things easier. Then zoom in, and move the different parts around using the Arrow tool until they fit together perfectly (using the arrow keys on your keyboard is useful for very fine moves). If you have made sure to fit one edge of your drawing against the edge of the scanner anytime you scanned a part, then they should not be crooked with regard to each other, and you should be able to fit them all together. This part IS annoying sometimes, especially if you have four parts or more.

Once you've done this, you can fuse the different layers together into one single picture.


What does happen quite often is that although you managed to stitch the picture together, so that every line on one part connects with the other part... you can still see the sharp edges of the different parts in some places (usually on the edges of the picture), because of slight color/exposure discrepancies. This can be fixed quite easily with a bit of patience. You need to use the Stamp tool (Cloning tool on some versions of Photoshop or Gimp). What the Stamp tool does is that it copies a small part of your picture when you press Alt and click. Then when you click again in another place (without the Alt key), it will duplicate the copied part in that place. What you need to do here is to "clone" some little parts of the picture on either side of the visible edge alternatively, and copy them on the edge, to camouflage it. I think it's easier to understand on the picture:



This allows to effectively hide the visible sharp edges that may appear when stitching together the different parts. Don't ever use the Smudge or Blur tools! They give terrible results.



Making your picture look just like the real thing


You're almost there! Now, as you might have noticed... artwork scans just fresh off the scanner usually look bad.
Unless your scanner is calibrated properly with a dedicated device, it's next to impossible to pick the exact true colors right out of the scanner: they usually come out greyish and tinged and beuargh. As I said earlier, I wouldn't tweak the settings of the scanner too much unless you know what you're doing, because you can always fix that during post-editing, as I'm showing here.

The first thing you need to do is to make sure that your screen is properly calibrated for brightness and colors, if you haven't already. There are (expensive) devices to do this, but you can use the poor man's method and find calibration tests online to calibrate your monitor visually.

Once your screen is calibrated, here are the three settings I use to adjust my pictures. You will find them in the scrolling menus at the top of your software. I make sure to have my original drawing next to my screen to be able to compare and get as close as possible to the original.


+ Brightness/Contrast : Tweak this a bit to adjust the lighting of the picture.

+ Levels : This is a little bit more tricky. The black area you're seeing on the screen shows the distribution of darkness of the pixels over your whole picture, from "black" (on the left) to "whi" (on the right). Basically, if your picture contains a lot of light colours, you'll see a big hump on the right, and a long, thin trail to the left, as you can see on the example below - and vice versa. What is interesting here is that it shows how light is your lightest pixel, and how dark is your darkest one. If your picture should contain some pure black parts, then the black area should end at the rightest end of the plot. If it doesn't... then your darkest pixel isn't black. You can fix that by moving the small arrow on the left to the left-est end of the black area. Same for white: if the lightest part of your picture should be white, then make sure to move the right arrow to the right end of the black area. Moving the middle arrow tweaks the light-to-dark balance and can be useful too sometimes.



+ Color balance : Here you'll need to tweak the controls a bit to adjust the colors, and make them as vibrant as on the original. Even when the colors "look right" at first sight at this stage, I've found that they can always look better with a little bit of color balance editing.


Just one last step and you're done!
If you're planning to make prints, you absolutely need to clean up the picture. Zoom in at maximum magnitude, and scrutinize the picture. You will always always find some tiny specks of dust, eraser peel, dirt on the scanner glass, that need to be removed. You can do this using the Stamp tool as I explained above, in the "scanning large artworks" part.


And then don't forget to save your file... and you're done!!! Hurray!!!

Keep the large file just in case or for printing, and you can make smaller low-res copies for the internet.



I hope this was useful to some of you!
Do share your own tips if you have some, I sure would like to hear them!

Aaaand although I don't want to sound like I'm comment-whoring... it's always nice to know whether you found this issue interesting, what you'd like to read about in the next issues, etc. It's more motivating to write those journals when you know that some people are actually reading them!