Scanning

Ballisto

Hey I'm kind of new to this whole scanning thing, any tips for making scanned stuff look good but not be huge files? I usually draw in pencil w/o much sketching. What I do is load it into jasc paint shop, scale down the resolution, and fool around with the brightness/contrast to make the lines darker (it's always too soft scanned). Now how do I convert it to monochrome without looking like crap?

Liku

What? Just white or Black? Scan as Line Art then. If not that, in PhotoShop hit Ctrl+L and mess with the Threshold to get the greys out.

taboofires

Yes line art is easy: get rid of all stray marks, make sure your lines are dark (or pen). Might even want to trace/redraw it onto a new piece of paper if the original is smudgey. Any leftover grey areas can be removed via contrast (easy but not accurate) or levels (harder to play with but usually well worth the effort).

If you want to scan a shaded or colored drawing, you pretty much just need a really good scanner for it to turn out well...

But whatever you do, don't resize it until you're at the final stages if you're going to edit it! You can afford using the extra HD space while you have a work in progress, and it really will make a big difference in the end quality. Also avoid lossy compression formats (like jpeg) until the end as well.

Ballisto

It's not really smudgey... just full of lines.

And I wish I had the $$ for photoshop.

taboofires

<a href='http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/catsclicks/story/0,24330,3610916,00.html' target='_blank'>try out these (tech tv) short article</a>

Anyone know whether GIMP (I think a new version just came out), Pixia, or PhotoPlus have a level adjustment like Photoshop?

kyliegirl

umm all i do is scan the pic put into jasc psp then i get the paint bucket tool and set it as

blend mode- overlay
match mode- none

select the darkening colour to usually black.. sometimes i make it blue or sumfin,, then the opacity to 80 or 100,, depending on how dark i want it then i click, and it makes all the lines darker and more desirable.

eg