Miss Special's Handy Dandy Scanning Tips
(and a little more)

Disclaimer: All of the following is stuff I've learned solely from experience. If you know a better way to do things, then there's no reason to change your methods on the "authority" of someone like me. If you're unfamiliar with scanning or would like to see if you can learn anything new, read on.

So you want to scan a picture. Cool! There are a few things you're going to need.

In fact, everything you need is pretty essential, so if you don't have them, you can't scan the picture. You need a computer, a scanner (already installed and such), and a drawing. Like I said, if you don't have those, you're out of luck.

Some people don't have a scanner, so they take a picture of the drawing instead. This isn't a terribly good method, as you have to worry about proper lighting, the flash washing parts of the drawing out, and all sorts of other interference, and the drawing is much, much harder to work with. Cameras should only be a last resort.

The first steps are pretty intuitive: Put the drawing facedown on the scanner bed. It's good to make sure the surface is free of dust and things like that, otherwise you'll wind up with scanner crud that you'll have to clean up in a photoshop, which can be a pain.

You're going to need some sort of scanning-type program. Sorry, I can't really help you here. You should've gotten some software with your scanner, or some photoshops/photostudios have an option to acquire the scan.

Once you get to the scanning interface, which will differ from one scanner to another, you'll get a bunch of different options. I'll address some of them:

- Resolution: Basically, the higher the resolution, the bigger your pic's going to be. It'll be more detailed, but all the little impurities will be easier to see. Scanning around 300 dpi or so is good; if it's too big, you can shrink it down later.

- Color options: You have (basically) three options. RGB color, which is full color, grayscale/gray shades/something like that, and 1-bit/lineart, or something to that effect. There are sometimes more options for RGB and grayscale, but that's the basic jist.
RBG color is what you should use for scanning already colored things. RGB images are larger (in filesize) than grayscale and lineart, and there's no point in taking up space on the harddrive for color that shouldn't be there. Also, scanning lineart or gray drawings as color drawings invites little pixels of color to make themselves at home in your drawing. It doesn't look good.
Grayscale scanning is good for pencil drawings, or pretty much anything that doesn't have color. It keeps the filesize down and stops evil little color pixels in their tracks.
1-bit color is perfect for lineart and lineart only. It scans the image as purely black-and-white, meaning no shades of gray or anything in between. If you want to digitally color lineart, this is generally the best way to go (with some exceptions, but I'm only covering the basics). Pencil lineart doesn't go 1-bit very well, so you may want to ink your drawing instead.

-You should also get a window that should show the scanning area. You can select the area you want scanned, cutting down on blank space. You don't have to get it exact (you can crop the image later), and you should give yourself a little extra space, just in case.

There are other features, but those are the most important ones. Once you've got those taken care of, you image should be ready to scan.

Other nice things:

-Cropping! If you've got a lot of blank space on your picture that you don't really need, cropping is a lovely way to get rid of it.
You'll need a photoshop of some sort. Painting programs and their ilk (in my experience) don't have cropping features. Also, the crop tool works differently for different programs. I'll try to keep it basic enough to apply to any program (but I don't know how every program works):

-This is what the crop tool generally looks like. In Adobe Photoshop, you use the tool itself to drag a box around the image you want to keep. In other cases, you use the selection tool before you use the crop tool.

-Image resizing! This is the way you want to go to make a really, really big picture smaller. Large images are good to work with, but are harder to look at and download. You should save the original file, in case you want to go back and work with it again (it's also good to save layered files in a filetype that supports layers, however bwint only accepts .jpg and occasionally .bmp files).
To resize an image, find the Image Size option (it should be under either Image or Edit). You'll get a little window with the width and height of the picture represented in numbers. The numbers generally refer to pixels. You'll also see checked boxes with "constrain proportions" or something like that. Basically, if you have that box checked, you can change the height of the picture and the width will change accordingly (and vice versa).
To change the size, just change the number of pixels. There's no specific ideal size to get the picture to-- I usually shoot for 1000 pixels on one side or another. If it looks good and isn't massive (or tiny) at that size, then it's good. As far as filesize goes, I shoot for 200 kb or less. Beast Wars International doesn't accept anything over 700 kb.

Well, I hope this was helpful! As I stated at the beginning, this is just some of the stuff I've taught myself over the years. There are undoubtedly people who know more about this than myself.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Send 'em to me!

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