Shards

The following is a quick and basic tutorial on scanning. Hopefully this will help those of you who do not work digitally, but would like to submit work nonetheless.

For the sake of this tutorial, I'm using VistaScan, the default scanning software that comes with Umax scanners. There are lots of different scanner packages available, and yours will vary depending on the brand of scanner you are using. Some are more complex than this one, but they tend to all have the same basic options. So here is your scanning window (click to get a bigger image):

For the most part, we can ignore the buttons in this window. All we really need to be concerned with are those menus at the top right. Here's a breakdown of what they are:

The first menu should almost always be set to Reflective. This is the setting for any solid surface, like paper or canvas. Other options here include Transmissive, which is what you use to scan transparent things (like overhead transparencies) and Negative, a special setting to scan photographic negatives.

The second menu is your color selection. You should keep this on RGB color all the time if you have Photoshop. Other settings include Web Color, which only allows for the 216 web-universal colors, and a black & white setting. Now, you can use these settings if they pertain to what you are scanning, but I highly recommend that you scan everything as RGB color, and then alter it later in Photoshop. I have found that scans of black & white photos come out much more vividly if scanned in RGB color and then converted to true black & white in Photoshop.

The third menu is dpi (dots per inch), and this is the biggest choice you have to make when scanning. The higher this number, the longer it will take to scan. If you intend to only show this image on the web, you only need to do 72 dpi, as that's the highest that can be displayed on computer monitors (unless you have one of those really pretty flatscreens). If you want to print this image, then you need to do at least 200, sometimes higher, depending on what kind of printer you will be using. It is very important to know beforehand what kind of output device your image will be going to. If you don't have any idea, then scan it at somewhere around 400 or so, just to be safe.
As well, there is another use for this menu. If you have a small image that you want to make larger, and then show on the web, scan it in at a higher resolution. Say you have a drawing that is only 3 inches by 4 inches, and you want to double that. Scan it in around 150 dpi, and then you will be able to later convert it to 6 by 8 at 72 dpi, effectively trading size for resolution, without any quality loss.

The fourth menu is the descreen menu. Ignore this for fanart concerns and leave it off. This is only used for special settings when scanning newspaper articles or high-resolution art magazines.

The fifth menu is the filters menu. If you have Photoshop, you may refer to this as the "Useless Crap" menu. It will contain filters like blur and sharpen, which can also be found in Photoshop. However, since this is free scanning software and not expensive graphics software, these filters will turn out a lot uglier than the Photoshop ones. Never use them. If you do not have a graphics program with these filters, and you wish to apply them, you can give them a try, but be advised that scanning software pretty universally sucks at filters.

Finally, the last menu is the resize menu. It's another one I recommend you never use. This will make your image larger or smaller, but it will do a vastly inferior job to what most graphics programs are capable of. Use it only as a last resort.

And that's pretty much it as far as important settings. Other things to remember are to always preview your image. Most scanners can give you a preview in less than 10 seconds, and that is a lot faster than it will take you to correct a problem later or rescan the entire thing. As well, if you can afford the time and disc space, scan multiple versions of things, at different resolutions. The best way to learn what works best is to try different settings and experiment. If all else fails, go down to Kinko's and have them scan it for you. But hopefully this will aid those of you who were struggling with scanner software. Good luck.