Am I the only person who does art the old-fashioned way - by hand? I've been considering drawing something related to Lusternia, except I know from past experience that when I scan a drawing, it does not look the same as it did on paper. Last time I drew something, I took a picture of it with my camera and uploaded that, and that looked better, but it still loses some quality of course. Any suggestions?

All of my drawings are in my sketch book and colored with colored pencil, if that counts.

You might consider trying out a different scanner? Some scanners give your drawing weird tints and usually make them too light -- and if that's the case (the too light thing), my scanner does the same thing. Just plug the picture into Photoshop and play with multiplying layers and changing % of the visibility.

That or you can try tracing them with pen and scan those... Though I know I'm not the biggest fan of pen-drawing since my hands aren't steady. ._.


I wanna see, I wanna see.

For scanners some tips:
- only use flatbed scanners
- use the maximum -optical- dpi setting. Optical dpi is the first number, for example canon canoscan 8800F has a dpi rating of 4800x9600 dpi, the optical rate here is 4800
- your scanner needs a minimum optical dpi setting of 1200
- adjust lightning in third party software like photoshop
- Maximum dpi on the box = software adjusted = makes drawings ugly = do not use

The use of photo cameras is actually a lot harder, cheaper cameras (eg under 400 dollars) use software to automaticly adjust lightning and often have an inferior flash, this can ruin your drawing. If you have a more expensive one (semi-pro or pro SLR cameras) you will most likely be more experienced in lightning and gain much better result then the standard line scanners.

I'm not using a pen over my nicely-shaded pencil or charcoal.

As for editing programs... On my laptop (which is not connected to my printer, guess I could try to fix that) I have Lightroom, and on both laptop and desktop I have Picasa (for the basic editing I use on most of my photography).

I definitely can't afford a new scanner. The specs on my current one are:

Color vertical optical resolution 1440 dpi dpi
Color horizontal optical resolution 5760 dpi dpi

My camera isn't a disposable piece of junk. It wasn't $400 but it still has aperture, resolution, and all that (and obviously I can turn the flash off...). Maybe I should post some scanned drawings as examples? Then again without the original in front of you it won't mean much.

man if that is your optical dpi on the scanner I am soooo jealous, that is pro range.

Also I am not really dishing cheaper cameras, even though I have a semi-pro SLR i still use a cheaper one for many things. It is just that very few fixed lens cameras support external lighting options and raw format. (and really why would they, most users want a neat jpeg or other ready to use format out of their cameras anyway)

If you are drawing in charcoal, I would suggest against a scanner and instead set up a proper photo-taking place, for lack of a better word. But you might be doing that already, in which case my advice would be pretty useless.

Really? Good to know!




Oh yeah, well first of all I have a spray to preserve charcoal drawings from smudging (I assume that's what your concern would be with scanning charcoal?) but I wouldn't do that anyway, I'd take a picture.

Thanks for the feedback. I had actually forgotten about Lightroom, but as for lighting, Picasa does a pretty good job too, so I'll try those two and see what I can do.

I still draw on paper! And wow! Fellow drawing-person!

Thought I was the only one!

Hey! I draw on paper sometimes! Just usually not, because I don't have the money for supplies or a lot of space to even draw on. Computer's just way more convenient for me.

You might have already tried this, but no one has brought it up, so I figured I might as well suggest it: have you tried adjust the levels and contrast with a graphics program like Photoshop? That usually does the trick for me.