Scanning in Art via Photoshop for the Web
You should always think of any image, as a collection of dots. On the web, these are called pixels, which is a single unit of color, or a colored dot. In the print world, these dots are also called pixels, or dots. A screen can only display 72 pixels, per inch, whereas in the print world, you can put as many in as you can fit. The standard tends to be 300 pixels per inch, or dpi (dots per inch) for textbook quality. However, the more dots, the better the picture, and the bigger you can stretch it out.
That being said, whatever you scan in, will be stuck at the ‘resolution’ you are using. If you scan something in at 300 dpi, then stretching it larger will spread those dots apart, making the picture less sharp. Shrinking the picture brings the dots closer together, resulting in a sharper, yet smaller image.
So when scanning artwork, it’s best to think big, but realize that a larger picture will take longer to scan, and take up more disk space. It’s best to start with twice the size that you’ll need in the end. So, for a standard print sheet, scan in at 600 dpi, that way you can bring it down to 300 dpi for print, or 72 for web, but you still have some room to breath.
Once you’ve decided on what resolution to bring something into Photoshop with, make sure to save your work as a TIFF or PSD file, rather than a JPEG or other format. This will store your picture without compression, which may take up more space, but will preserve the original art. JPEG and other file formats run compression algorithms (code that shrinks the file size by reducing the amount of colors) and may reduce the quality of your work. This may not be noticable right up front, but it’s good to start with something as close to your original piece as possible.
