Scanning your work involves a couple of non-apparent
problems. Resolution and other scanning issues
are potentially quite confusing, but it becomes
a bit clearer with practice.
First, get to know your scanning software’s
“advanced” mode – it’s
faster and, once you know it, more useful than
the hold-your-hand sissy-mode.
Second, you should generally predict how your
image is going to be seen in order to know how
big to scan it. Our example image will probably
only be seen on screen and printed out on 8
½ by 11 inch sheets of paper. I drew
it on an 8 ½ by 11 inch sheet of paper,
and I don’t imagine that it’ll be
blown up poster-size, so I’m going to
scan the image at 100% its original size. It’s
usually best to scan at 100% even if you‘ll
want to take it down later. That can always
be done in Photoshop. However, if you think
you’ll want to enlarge it, it’s
best to do that in the scanner.
Third, knowing what resolution to scan at
is not tricky, but you do need to make some
more educated guesses. Basically, it's wise
to scan with as much or more resolution as you
imagine you’ll need. In my case, when
our image is printed, I can’t see a difference
between 200 DPI and 300 DPI or higher. Some
people claim 150 DPI is generally sufficient
for printing images, but I can still see a bit
of pixelly wretchedness at that point. 300 DPI
is a good resolution that’ll give me nice
clarity in the printout, more than I’ll
ever need for screen display, and a bit of room
if I want to blow it up slightly or enlarge
some details.
The important thing to keep in mind is that
you should never be scaling up your image or
adding resolution after you’ve scanned
your image. When you scan at 300 DPI, you’re
giving 300 dots of image information to every
square inch of your image file. Think of it
like replacing the floor of your room with 300
red grapes for every meter of floor space. The
floor space represents your image. The floor
must always be covered in grapes, otherwise
you have a gaping hole of nothingness, which
violates the rules of the universe.
Now, what if we were to renovate your room,
adding a giant walk-in closet, a breakfast nook,
and six additional square meters of floor space?
Remember – not covering the floor space
with grapes results in universe-violating holes
of nothingness. The only way we can cover the
holes of nothingness is by violently smushing
all the grapes so that, flattened, they all
expand to fill the empty space. Now our room
is pleasantly in accordance with the space-time
continuum, but the floor looks like crap. This
is what happens when you try to scale up your
images in Photoshop. You get a crappy-looking
floor.
The sad part of this story is that your room
is completely closed off from the rest of the
world (except for the nothing-holes, but they
don’t count), so your grape supplier will
never be able to provide you with the fresh,
new grapes that could have been used instead
of smushing the existing grapes.. Same thing
with Photoshop. Unfortunately, Photoshop is
still too dumb to know what your original drawing
looked like and provide new grapes based on
that fond recollection. The only time you’ll
ever have fresh grapes is when you scan your
image.
So: don’t scale your image up unless
you like smushed grapes.
Anyway, I scanned the example image directly
into Photoshop at 100% its original size and
300 DPI. Your scanner should allow you to scan
directly into Photoshop, too. If you don’t
know how, consult your manual or “The
Inter-Net”.
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