The Benefits Of Scanning Your Artwork Over Taking Photos Of It

I scan as well, I've never been able to get an acceptable digital copy using a camera.

I only a small scanner , but most of my artworks are much larger...

I only a small scanner , but most of my artworks are much larger...

I use Panavue Image Assembly to stitch multiple scans together. It's quirky software, but it's free. It claims to do mosaics but I haven't been able to get it to do anything more than a single row so I've come up with workarounds. For example, a 16x20 requires 6 scans to get good overlap on my 9X12 scanner. I stitch the scans of the top row together, then stitch the scans of the bottom rows together, now I have two images. Then I rotate them so they'll from a row of two images and stitch those together into one full image, which I think rotate to the proper orientation in my images editing software and crop and adjust as needed.

interesting. thanks for sharing your method.

Yeah for mine my scan bed is recessed to hold 8 1/2 x 11 so I put them on top but there is always a side that is warped because of the bevel - so I have to overlap parts, cut parts off, and eventually have something I am satisfied with.

It's cool to see so many other people using scanning too - I just wish larger scanners were cheaper!

---Shawn Dall
ShawnDall.com

i always recommend scanning. cameras vary too much. lighting, angle, etc - are all hard to do. the only time a camera is better is when you have texture and you need to side light it. a scanner tends to flatten a piece and you get no depth at all. and of course stitching is a pain.

i took an image that was about the size of my hand. and i made a couch sized print with it.

what always has amazed me is.... a painter etc, will take hours, if not weeks to make the perfect piece. then they shoot it with their phone, say, it looks good enough and uploads it here. wouldn't they want the image on the screen to look like the piece in their hands? or do they think someone will push a magic button and make it work?

scanners can scan more than paintings though. if you get into scanography, you can make entire scenes. i've seen some amazing things done with them. where they prop them up on their sides, and people arrange pictures in front of them. some paint right on the glass (don't do that btw). others like me, arrange the object on the glass, but dirt is an issue.


these two were made by placing a fairly limp flower on the glass and arranging it with a soft brush.


this took a long time to arrange then clean after. the image was about 4 times larger than this. i had to reduce it for size here.


the scanner kills depth. this image is 1/2" thick or so, but its too evenly lit, and if you have peaks like a knife would do, it flattens them. if there is dimension, it often creates oblique angles that look odd as well. some materials may have rainbow effect when the light passes by. and if the image moves you'll have a ghost effect.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Sean, my scanner has a bevel too. I put a larger piece of glass on top to create a flat surface to put the art on. The extra pane of glass doesn't seem to effect the scan.

it may effect the contrast though, and it would also mess with the depth.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I can't see any difference either way Mike, I looked hard even. If the painting is larger than the scanner your going to have a depth issue regardless because you can't set the painting all the way down onto the bed. Anyway, I haven't noticed anything detrimental happening to my images from using another piece of glass.

I work small, usually well under 8 x 10". The thing I love most about scanning is that the image can now be printed out beautifully at a much larger size than I am comfortable working.

my scanner is a pain in that I cannot remove the lid - on my old scanner I could which allowed me to scan bigger things. All my pieces are 14" x 17" - that's just the size of the sketchpads I use - anything bigger and it's too big to scan. I usually lay my piece into the corner of the scan window and then put a big sketch pad on top of the image with the lid up - the lid is only there to provide a bg for the light.

because the light scans everything uniformly you are not going to get depth because every micrometer is lit - this can also cause weird lighting effects on your art - esp. if you use shiny mediums - that is why my scanner is specialty glare reduced, so I don't have to worry about that. I don't use the lid though because it has this like box thing on it to press scans into the bevel, and that causes indentations in the paper I discovered. Why they can't just have a flatbed scanner that scans anything bigger than a letter size that doesn't cost a fortune is silly imo, but I get why.. most people just wanna scan documents, and a corporate scanner is going to give you horrible quality output.

I do believe scanning is an art within itself though - as it takes a long time to get it looking good and the colours looking like the original I find. Also looking at your art in different lights will also change how it looks. I find taking a picture of my work, the piece never looks as good lighting wise - even if the lighting on the pic is stellar - photography can be good for people, but not for the nuances of an art piece, esp. if you are a detail oriented artist such as myself.

---Shawn Dall
ShawnDall.com

I have a fancy new Epson Perfection V600 scanner. I'm trying to figure out how to scan my paintings best. Does anyone else use this printer? Should I scan on auto/home/office/professional setting?

And, this thing can be set for really high dpi. What is the best dpi for small paintings that can be printed in larger format?

Thanks in advance for your help. I'm just getting set up over here.

Stacey Brown

I have the V500, just an older version of the same thing I'm guessing. I use the pro settings so I can adjust it as necessary. I find I need to tone down the blue range a bit to get a more accurate scan on mine. I just scan at 300 dpi which produces an image which on FAA will give you a print up to 300% larger than the original. I personally won't offer anything scaled up larger than 300%, but there are other artists here who offer much bigger enlargements so that's a personal choice. I also scan to TIF rather than JPG. I make any further necessary adjustments in TIF format before I save it as a JPG (highest quality setting) for uploading to FAA.

Shawn, you might look at the Epson WorkForce WF-7510. It's just a multipurpose unit with scanner, but it has a 13" x 19" scan bed, it uses LED instead of fluorescent, you get a wide-format printer with it, and it's cheap. I had Epson's top of the line tabloid scanner, over $2,000, but I sold it because this unit gives me more accurate color, with no need for correction. You can download Epson Scan, which is better than what comes with the printer, but I'm using VueScan instead.

Small paintings or photographs may scan well. But when a painting does not fit on a scanner because of the size, you would need to stitch the multiple scans together. More difficult imo than using a camera.

"More difficult imo than using a camera."

Not for me, no matter what I tried I couldn't get an acceptable reproduction using a camera. I scan 16X20's in six scans. The scans take about ten minutes to do. The stitching using PanaVue Image Assembler takes maybe another ten minutes, for a total of 20 minutes to do a scan. Setting up the painting on an easel or a wall and the camera on a tripod wherever you have perfect conditions for it (outside under north light?) and then setting the white balance and taking the photos then taking all that back down has to take at least 20 minutes total.

I will try this Panavue, in the past I have used another program for stitching my painting scans together, and it wasn't easy. I downloaded the free copy.

The mosaic stitch feature in Panavue doesn't work the way it should. For example the 16x20 requires 6 scans, which is two rows of three scans. I can't get Panavue to handle multiple rows however even though that's what mosaic stitching is supposed to do. So, what I do is I just stitch the images in each row (you have to make sure they are in a left to right order as well) in separate stitching operations to create two images, one for each row of scans, then I rotate the two images so that they now form a row and stitch them together to make one complete image that I can then manipulate and edit as needed. It's a bit quirky but it works and is free.