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  • #992478
    forrie
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        I have some artwork I want to scan in – large format, piecemeal, where I stitch it together in Photoshop so that I can later have the higher-res data available if I decide to create prints.

        My question is about what digital format is best for this purpose? My hunch is TIFF. Whatever would be the best for a printer to obtain the color and image data for printing.

        I know there is a way to do your own color separations CMYK in Photoshop, but I’m not sure I would need to go that far.

        Thank you!

        #1215861
        katwalk
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            I use Photoshop also for my photographs and to scan my artwork, photos come off the camera as JPG’s but JPG’s aren’t really a very good format if you plan on manipulating the files as every time you save it after some changes you loose data. So if you decide to keep JPG’s make sure you have a copy that you never save over. (burning to a DVD or CD that can’t be re-written would work)

            OK, so photographs are automatically JPG’s, for my art work scans I save them as TIFF’s and as high a quality as I can, though to be honest most of my artwork is small so high rez scans are a bit overkill. The scanned format is BMP, but many programs today don’t read BMP so I switch the files to TIFF for storage.

            Anyway it is up to you, you can save as JPG’s as long as you don’t plan on doing anything other than print the files, if you want to play with them then I would use TIFF. But be aware that to actually print them you may have to convert them back to JPG’s. Though it sounds like you are after a higher quality print.

            I would leave color separation to the experts, and I think it totally depends on the printing process being used if it is needed. I don’t think even high quality Ink Jet printers would need it, my home printer certainly doesn’t. I think single color plates are only used in offset printing, like for catalogs or magazines, but unless you are into publishing your own book, magazine, newspaper or need 1000’s of copies of your artwork I don’t think it likely that you will go that route. But I may be wrong, if so I would think that any professional printer will be able to tell you what their requirements are, and I would also think that if they needed color separation they would do it themselves so they could make any necessary adjustments. Color can be very dependent on pigments and each printer may prefer different inks, which would use different pigments. Also if you sell your image to a publisher they will probably have professionals who will do the color separations if necessary, and it is possible that they would want the actual artwork to make their own scans, I would guess that it depends on what you sell them, just image or image and copyright.

            #1215863
            kdd
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                tif is the way to go. you can scale the scan as large as you want/can. your software may balk and tell you it could take a while, so what, go grab a cup of tea or whatever your preferred poison is.

                i usually scan around 600 dpi and scale to whatever i need. i scanned a 35mm transparency to the size of a sheet of arches paper. took a while, but i have the image, several hundred mb worth of data.

                you can also color correct (to a degree) and adjust density and contrast too.

                cheers,
                dwain

                The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression.
                Wassily Kandinsky ~ "Concerning The Spiritual In Art"

                #1215860
                WFMartin
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                    Yes, JPG is considered to be a “lossy” type of format. Each time you re-save the file, it loses definition. TIFF is a much better choice.

                    Don’t bother trying to do your own “color separations”, because once a lithographer gets your images, he will only modify them, anyway, to fit his specific printing conditions.

                    You can change your files to TIFF’s, and make them CMYK, but don’t bother going much further.

                    Just do your best to furnish the printer with the subjects in hard copy form that you already like. There is nothing more difficult for a color-separator to do than to be furnished with copy that appears one way, but for the client to want it to look like something else. Printers can do a rather good job of matching what they are given, but it’s a crap-shoot for the separator to be required to guess as what you may truly want it to look like.

                    Lithographers’ operations and profiles are engineered to match existing copy–not re-invent it. Of course, modifying it to look like something else is well within the parameters of today’s technology–it just takes longer, and time is money to you.

                    I was a color separator/lithographer for over 40 years.

                    wfmartin. My Blog "Creative Realism"...
                    https://williamfmartin.blogspot.com

                    #1215862
                    opainter
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                        Graphics editors use simple bitmaps internally, so the best way to avoid any kind of loss when saving an image is to save it into bitmap (.BMP) format. Other formats may be lossy (like GIFs or JPGs) or other errors may occur when the bitmap is translated into some other format for saving. This can be the case even when the other format is a “loss-less” format, because translation of the bitmap involves calculations, and calculations often involve rounding errors.

                        The one exception to this is if you want to preserve some of the history of how you edited the image along with the image itself. More advanced editors (such as Photoshop) often provide a proprietary format in which images can be saved that does preserve the history of edits, so that you can reopen the image in the same editor and then go back to previous edits or at least view how you arrived at the image as it currently is.

                        Since you are using Photoshop, you have the choice. I would consider saving the image twice: the first time in Photoshop’s format (which I think is .PSD) and the second time in bitmap (.BMP) format. Just saving it as a PSD file is not good practice, because Photoshop might change details of this format or details of its application (Photoshop) so that in the future you might not be able to retrieve your image in that format!

                        P.S. – I see that a lot of other people here are recommending TIF format. “TIF” is actually a set of formats, some of which are lossy (not good) and some (many) of which are loss-less (good). I think you would have play pet detective to be sure that you were actually saving your image in a loss-less format when using the TIF. Additionally, because of how TIF storage scheme works, it does appear to me that rounding errors will occur.

                        AJ (opainter), C&C always welcome
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