Expert: Amy - 1/5/2006

Question
Hi Amy
I need to digitalize handdrawn multicolor artwork that will ultimately be published as cards accompanying a book. The original watercolor illustrations are 7.5 x 9.6 inches in size and will be reduced to cards approx 3.6 x 5.3 inches. I presently have an Epson Perfection 1260 scanner (which apparently cannot provide anything more than 1200dip resolution with my computer's (PC) present memory of 512MB). I have several questions:
Do I need a better scanner, or more memory to achieve the (3200dpi) high quality product I'm aiming for?
What resolution do I really need to scan this in to Illustrator (CS2) at so I can reduce the art and still assure the book manufacturer of the dpi resolution they need (minimum 3200dpi)? Or would it be better to reduce it at the time I originally scan it in?
I greatly appreciate your assistance in this as I'm am definitely a creative, not techie, type.  

Answer
Hi Andrea.

That's pretty high for artwork. I've never done a book, so I can't say if it's excessive but it does make things difficult. Are these black and white or color? Anyway...

The easy answer, but not the one you want to hear, is that you should have these watercolors professionally scanned. For a few reasons. The resulting CMYK files will be HUGE. You'll have a hard time color-correcting them or editing them if needed and you don't have enough memory to place them in Illustrator... well you could probably place them but you'll have a tough time working with the files once the images are placed.

Your Epson will provide you with a finished product that's roughly 2400 using max hardware scan capability (that's original size scanned @ 1200 dpi then reduced approx 50% to finished size, doubling the resolution... so figure 1200 x 2).

Your scanner is supposed to allow you to scan at higher resolutions using interpolation. You say your machine doesn't have enough memory to do this, but if you could go up to say 1600 dpi, you'd be at 3200 dpi when you reduce the artwork to its final size.

Keep in mind that this is an interpolated scan - you'd see some degradation of your artwork.  Since I can't see your artwork, I can't tell you to what extent this would affect your artwork's appearance. You should try this and see what you get but I have a feeling you'd have an incredibly difficult time working with the files due to their disk size. As far as reducing afterwards or during the scan... if you have PhotoShop, do it afterwards.

I hope this helps a little???  I will also say that there are a lot of places that offer scanning services but be careful. If this is important to you, contact a professional printer and ask if they offer scanning services. A digital place might be able to handle it but I doubt they'd color correct as well as a print shop guy.

-Amy Pace