Scanning Comic Art

When scanning your comic art there are several things to consider before you start.

Below I've broken it down by types of Artwork.

Black and White Inks: If your art is only black and white inks without any ink washes or grey scales then I suggest that you scan your art work as Black/White also sometimes called bitmap at 1200 dpi and if you are not importing directly into photoshop then I suggest saving it as a .tiff file. Why scan it in at such a high resolution? After you've scanned the file you will be reducing it's after converting it into greyscale, scanning at black and whites at a high res. before reducing them in another mode will help preserve the originals line quality. After you have the image in Photoshop I would change it's mode to greyscale. A pop-up window will appear asking you what ratio: Entering 1 will keep the image at 1200 dpi and the same size. Entering 2, will reduce the image by half- higher the number the more of a reduction (you can also do this after you've changed the mode)



Step by step:
1:Scan Art work as "Black and White/bitmap" at 1200 dpi (if not importing directly into Photoshop then save it as a .tiff file)
2:Open image in Photoshop.
3:Go to the "Image" menu select Mode/greyscale"
4.If you did not reduce your image size in the pop-up ratio menu then do so by going to the menu Image/Image Size and reduce it to between 300 to 400- art is printed at 300 dpi so working at a higher resolution is for your own benefit.


Scanning Color and Toned Artwork:

I suggest scanning all color and toned artwork at least at 400 dpi. Scanning an ink wash image in greyscale will discard any ambient colors that may appear in a color scan. After scanning the image open it in Photoshop, the image may require some color correction in photoshop but this depends on how well color calibrated your monitor is- to test this try printing a sample of your image- but be aware that printers can also alter the images color.



Note: If you are preparing an image for the web- you can work on in RGB Mode (red, Green, and Blue) and reduce it's dpi to 72- that is web resolution. If preparing an image to professionally printed it must be in the mode CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) If you switch between RGB and CMYK there will be a noticeable difference.