kokocitty

First journal post wooo   I've been putting this off for a month xD

But anyway I just wanted to give some tips for scanning traditional art! It's probably not going to be anywhere near comprehensive, but it's based on the problems I had when first starting out. And scanning was pretty much the biggest problem I had  It's super frustrating when you work hard to make this bright colorful thing that you love, and it shows up all washed out and greyish when scanned.

Also I use a Canon LiDE scanner

Okay first off, make sure the scanner is set to scan in color or to scan color photos, and not to scan documents. This seems pretty obvious, but it caused 90% of my problems ) I was using the canon autoscan button which sort of just scans automatically, and I didn't realize the default setting was for documents. The difference was huge.

Speaking of settings, some scanners come with settings like fading correction too, which you might want to try if you like really saturated/bright colors! Usually though I just use the basic color photo settings and fix in photoshop. 

Which is the next important bit, you will almost definitely have to fix it up in photoshop or gimp or basically any image editing software. But it isn't very hard to do and takes a fairly short time

Usually the only things I have to do are adjust the hue and saturation, and adjust the levels.

Increasing saturation just makes the colors well, more saturated xD - a lot stronger. It almost instantly fixes the whole "washed out" feel that you get when scanning.

Along with that I adjust the hue sometimes when the scanner has got the colors wrong. For example, my picture could be yellow green and it would come out yellow orange when scanned. Usually I just move the hue slider around until it looks right again

You can google how to change hue and saturation for whatever program you're using I usually do Image-> Adjustments -> Hue and Saturation in Photoshop. 

After that I mess with the levels ^u^ And this sounds complicated but trust me, even if you have no idea what it means, once you start moving the sliders around, it's pretty obvious what it's doing. (It makes the whites whiter and the blacks darker). In Photoshop it's Image-> Adjustments ->Levels

And that's pretty much it OH one last, slightly related thing. If printing out traditional art that you scanned, make sure you're using CMYK mode and not RGB. This only applies to printing, but well, you never know when you'll need it xD It made an enormous difference to me lol

Thanks for reading ^_^