Scanning your original artwork will usually give you much better results than digital photographs. Follow these tips to get the best capture possible for printing. Before scanning, your artwork should be removed from any frame or mount.
One of the most important settings within your scanner application is the resolution, this is the number of pixels per inch (or cm) that will make up your digital image. We ideally print your images at 360dpi (dots per inch, sometimes referred to ppi / pixels per inch), if you want your image printed to 100% size or smaller, then make sure you scan at 360dpi or higher, we recommend 600dpi. If you require your image to be enlarged, then we’re going to need a few more pixels, 600dpi is plenty for most enlargements, but we recommend increasing the resolution to 1200dpi, for example, this will allow an A4 image to be scaled up to A1 with no increase in pixels and therefore no loss in sharpness and quality.
Your scanner software should provide you with a number of settings that will adjust the colour and tonal balance of your image, as well as define the kind of image you’re scanning and increase the scan quality to compensate for sharpness and reflection of papers with a gloss finish.
Experiment with the settings on your scanner, you can’t break it and you should always be able to return to the scanner’s default settings. Having a few different scans of your image will allow you to compare and send us the one you think is closest to your original.