Advice on Scanning your Drawings
4d
Silviu
Hello everyone!
A while ago I got a Cannon LiDE 400 scanner for my drawings. I thought it would be better than taking pictures with my phone, especially for receiving critiques.
I noticed however that it lightens the values of the drawings quite a bit (for graphite at least, I did not have a chance to try out other mediums so far). That's why I find myself having to edit the scanned drawings to try and achieve something that looks as close as possible to the real thing. I don't necessarily mind that, it's just that I want to get an image that is as faithful as possible to what I drew and not "enhance" it digitally in any way.
To give you an example, I've attached a shading practice I did today. First image is directly form the scanner, no edits. The third image is edited and much closer to the real drawing, but I tinkered with the exposure in RawTherapee a bit.
Is editing in this case common practice? Are there better ways to get an image of your drawing that is as close as possible to the real one?
Yes cleaning up the scanned image in an editor is completely standard practice. You may want to familiarize yourself with basic photo editing and I think this video might help you - https://youtu.be/_bB09dMLAko?si=wnFTif-B-5FN1jPX
I also want to say that you didn't needed to buy a scanner just to share your drawings. It's still good you invested in one as it will allow you to build a professional looking portfolio, but just to share your practice drawings online your phone camera would do the job.
Great! Thanks for the link and the advice!
And yes, I agree, getting the scanner solely for the purpose of receiving critiques would not have been necessary. For the most time I did submit my work as photographs (although getting decent lighting turned out to be tricky most of the time). But as you said, I saw it as a future investment that will become more useful as I progress.
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4d
I tried scanning my sketchbook earlier this week and it blew out all the white parts of my drawing. Very annoying! When you scan your stuff again, open the advanced settings instead of relying on the Auto Scan. I scan my work at 600DPI and disable all the auto features the scanner has. If that looks blown out white, take a photo of your art with a DSLR camera (I know it's an expensive investment) in a well lit area. To answer your final question, yes it's totally normal to use Levels after scanning so it looks right! The 2nd picture you uploaded looks great
Ok, that's good to know. Thanks for the advice!
Another quick question if I may.
As far as I understand it, for photographs, getting the set up right (lighting, perfectly straight-on shot, camera settings) is the tricky part. If you get all these right, is taking a photograph usually the go to for fine art? Or are there more professional scanners that achieve the best results?
I usually find there are two different sets of settings I need to play with - the scanner software settings which control what is actually sampled, and then image levels in the resulting image.
Of these two, I think the scanner settings are the most important. My default Epson scanner settings will lose a lot of value range from graphite or charcoal. The scan software's "Advanced" tab lets me set brightness, contrast, etc. and it is applied to previews. I usually reduce brightness and contrast around 10% and also sample at a higher resolution than I really want, e.g. 600 dpi even if I just want 300 or screen resolution ultimately. Also the exact settings for brightness etc. depend somewhat on the range of values in the actual drawing, whether it's high-key or low-key and how much gradient, the tone of the paper (and whether I want to preserve that instead of washing it out to white), etc. For me this kind of adjusting of scanner settings is needed if you don't want bands of gradient values to drop out.
I usually also find I need to do post-leveling of the image in an image editor (I use the Levels window in Photoshop). But if the scan was made with too much contrast or brightness, there's no way to fix that in post, so of the two I'd say scanner settings matter more.
This is really useful. For some reason, I completely missed some settings in my scanning software (small icons on the bottom). From what I understand, these allow me to change exactly what you described before scanning. Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it!
