Interesting scan expereince today
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I went to get some thigns scanned today at a local place. One was my treehouse picture. It wouldn't scan right. The guy said he'd never seen that happen before. It looks like everything with paynes gray went white or lighter! Anyone had that happen before?
Marsha Ottum Owen
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Wow, weird. I've never heard of that before, though there are some kinds of materials that don't scan well or refract light very strangely. But I used to work at a print center and my first guess would be that there was something amiss with their machine. Try another place. If all else fails, photograph it instead. Here is a guide on how to photograph your own artwork and get a good image out of it!
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@marsha-kay-ottum-owen everything i scan at home looks awful,i just take photos now instead,maybe there is something wrong with my scanner.
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@withlinesofink thanks for that link it may help me
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@dottyp I usually take bad cell phone pictures because I don't really NEED things scanned a lot but I wanted to see what a scanned and printed copy of the tree looked like. I will look at the link! Thanks.
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@withlinesofink Thanks for the link!
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@dottyp said in Interesting scan expereince today:
everything i scan at home looks awful
I'm curious now- what is "awful" about them? Also what scanner do you have?
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I do not know what happened here, but scanning often gives problems because of the way pigment reflects light. Without getting too technical, a scanner sends a beam of light to the paper, the paper reflects it and the scanner records the reflection. The beam of light is perpendicular to the paper and very close. Many pigments will behave weirdly in that situation, depending on the nature of the colored substance and the size of the pigment particles. I have often had issues with scanning pastel paintings, for example.
A better way to get digital images from paintings is photography. There are photographers that have specialized studios for the reproduction of flat materials (paintings, drawings, documents, etc...), it´s called a "repro" studio over here. An artist (I think it may have been Will) mentioned a large format scanner that is actually a photo camera mounted on top of a slow-moving bed, which takes perfectly flat pictures in sections and then combines them automatically.
In essence, it may yield better results to stick with photography. At school they told us to put the art outside, in the shade on the floor and took a photo standing over it, trying to keep the sides of the art parallel in the viewer of the camera (so that the camera lens is parallel to the surface of the paper). Outside in the shade on a sunny day you have the perfect light for repro work.
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If you lost the greys it is most likely a calibration problem.
What you should ask your scanner place is how is the scanner calibrated? Also, How often is it calibrated? Is the computer monitor calibrated? How often is it calibrated? Then if that setip is connected to a printer the same questions should be asked.
Scanners have to be calibrated daily for high end work and often will have different curved depending on the media being scanned.
Some info on calibration is here http://www.silverfast.com/highlights/printer-calibration/en.htmlSome media is problematic with scanning and some colors are out of gamut for scanning/reproduction.
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@smceccarelli said in Interesting scan expereince today:
Outside in the shade on a sunny day you have the perfect light for repro work.
If you want a corresponding indoor light obtain a flourescent light with a color temp of 5000k or D50. That's the temp bulb used to match colors and simulates outdoor light.
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@smceccarelli Thanks! I usually use my cell phone by the window and sometimes outside. I can see how working in the shade would help. I don't have a camera other than my phone.
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@withlinesofink My scanner is a HPG4050 ,when i scan it seems to be showing the grain of the paper/canvas and every single line mistake rather than the whole picture,when I use markers every blotch shows and the colours are muted ,when I use metallics paints they look dirty and biege instead of gold and sparkly.
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@dottyp Ah yes. A high quality scanner will pick up on the paper texture and all of the little mistakes. You can always tweak the white balance a bit to blow out some of the smudges and erased lines, or amp up the saturation. I personally do all of that clean-up in Photoshop after scanning.
Transparent mediums like markers and watercolor can sometimes be difficult with the harsh light of a scan because every overlap and difference in layer depth is emphasized as the light blows through it. I always recommend those be photographed instead.
Metallic paints will NEVER scan metallic. In fact, it's difficult to even photograph them in a nice way. They're one of the mediums that really just needs to be seen in person, but you can play with lighting in a photograph to get a bit of that sparkle to show up.
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@withlinesofink Oh I see! it was meant to be a really good scanner when I bought it.(of course it is probably outdated now) I will try to adjust my white balance.This is very interesting information as I always thought my shading and lines were ok until I scanned them.Thanks this really explains a lot.
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@withlinesofink Really interesting. I used watercolor so that could be a reason for the crazy scans too.
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@dottyp said in Interesting scan expereince today:
@withlinesofink Oh I see! it was meant to be a really good scanner when I bought it.(of course it is probably outdated now) I will try to adjust my white balance.This is very interesting information as I always thought my shading and lines were ok until I scanned them.Thanks this really explains a lot.
Sorry if I'm high-jacking, but are you scanning in TIFF or JPG? If you are scanning in JPG, scanning in TIFF might help.
Website: www.tessawrathall.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/tessawrathall_art/
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@tessw I have tried jpeg and tiff it does not seem to make any difference I think it is just hard to scan work done with markers .Thanks for the help anyway.
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Sorry if I'm high-jacking, but are you scanning in TIFF or JPG? If you are scanning in JPG, scanning in TIFF might help.
A tif file is a lossless which retains all the file information everytime you open and close the file. The files are larger with tif.
A JPG file is a lossy format which removes information from the file everytime it is saved and resaved. It is a smaller file format than tif.
A PNG is a lossless format which retains the quality and compresses the file. If you want tp use this for production you should check with your printer as some RIPs can have problems rasterizing this format.
