How to scan artwork for prints (the right way)

If you sell prints or made-to-order products, the digital file behind them matters more than almost anything else. A weak capture can’t be rescued later — no amount of editing adds detail that was never recorded. The good news is that for most flat artwork, a decent flatbed scanner and a careful workflow will out-perform a phone photograph every time, and it costs almost nothing to get right.

This guide covers the honest mechanics: why scanning beats photographing for flat work, what resolution to actually use, how to handle pieces bigger than your scanner bed, and the colour and file-format decisions that protect your image for years. It also says plainly where scanning stops being the right tool.

Why scan rather than photograph flat work?

A flatbed scanner gives you three things a camera struggles to match for flat art: perfectly even lighting across the whole surface, a sensor held exactly parallel to the artwork (so no keystone distortion), and consistent, repeatable colour. A scanner’s light source moves with the sensor, so there are no hotspots, no shadows from the edge of the paper, and no falling-off of brightness toward the corners. For watercolour, ink, pencil, gouache, lino prints, marker work and anything else that lies flat on paper, this consistency is exactly what reproduction needs.

A camera can do the job, but it asks a lot more of you: a copy stand or tripod squared dead-on to the work, two balanced lights at forty-five degrees, a colour reference chart, and careful post-processing to flatten the lighting. For a single flat piece, the scanner removes most of those variables for you.

What DPI should you scan at?

DPI (dots per inch) describes how finely the scanner samples your artwork. The number that matters is the final pixel count, because that determines how large you can print. The rule for print is roughly 300 PPI at the final printed size — so a file’s printable width is its pixel width divided by 300.

To work out the scan resolution you need, decide your largest intended print size, then scale up. The calculation is: scan DPI = (longest print dimension ÷ longest original dimension) × 300. So an A5 painting (roughly 6 inches on its long edge) that you want to sell as an A2 print (roughly 23 inches) needs about (23 ÷ 6) × 300 ≈ 1150 DPI to hold 300 PPI at full size.

In practice, scanning everything at 600 DPI is a sensible default for original-size or modest enlargements: it gives generous headroom, captures fine media texture, and keeps file sizes manageable. Push to 1200 DPI only when you genuinely need to enlarge small originals a lot. Going far above your scanner’s true optical resolution just produces bigger files with no extra real detail — interpolated pixels aren’t information.

Realform’s approach starts and ends with your scan. Its AI agents take the finished file you captured and compose it onto made-to-order products — they never generate or redraw your imagery. Because the platform composes your existing artwork rather than synthesising new pixels, the quality of your scan is the quality your customers receive, and the art stays entirely yours.

Colour accuracy and calibration

Colour is where most home scans quietly go wrong. Two things help enormously. First, scan in a known colour space — Adobe RGB or sRGB — and embed that profile in the file so other software interprets the numbers correctly. Second, calibrate. A profiled monitor means the colours you see while editing are the colours that actually exist in the file; without it you’ll ‘correct’ an image to match a screen that’s lying to you.

For serious work, scanning software such as VueScan can apply an IT8 scanner profile, which characterises exactly how your specific scanner sees colour and corrects for it. At minimum, scan a piece, compare it to the original under neutral daylight, and adjust white balance and saturation until the file matches what’s in front of you — not what looks punchy on screen.

File format and bit depth

Capture and archive in a lossless format. The standard for a master file is TIFF, which preserves every pixel with no compression artefacts. Where your scanner allows it, capture at 16-bit per channel rather than 8-bit: 16-bit holds vastly more tonal information, which gives you room to adjust levels and colour without banding appearing in smooth gradients and washes.

Keep that 16-bit TIFF as your untouched master. Do your edits on a copy, then export delivery files — typically 8-bit, in whatever format the print supplier wants. A short checklist for files:

• Master archive: 16-bit TIFF, lossless, full resolution, with the colour profile embedded — never overwrite this.
• Working copy: a duplicate of the master where you do levels, cleanup and retouching.
• Delivery file: 8-bit, sized and formatted to the print supplier’s spec (often TIFF or high-quality PNG; JPEG only if they require it).
• Name and date your files so the master is obvious and never accidentally flattened or resaved over.

Cleaning up the scan

Even a clean scan benefits from light correction. Set a true black and white point using a levels adjustment so the paper reads as the right shade rather than a dull grey. Remove dust spots, stray fibres and the faint scanner texture with a spot-healing tool. If the scan picked up the paper’s tone, neutralise it gently — but resist the urge to ‘whiten’ a cream paper into stark white if that changes the character of the original. The goal is a faithful reproduction, not a different picture.

Scanning work larger than your scanner bed

Most home flatbeds are A4. For larger pieces, scan in overlapping sections and stitch them. Scan each section at the same resolution and settings, overlapping neighbouring sections by roughly twenty to thirty per cent so there’s plenty of common detail to align. Keep the artwork flat and in the same orientation for every pass.

Then merge: in Photoshop, File > Automate > Photomerge, set the layout to Auto and keep ‘Blend Images Together’ ticked. It will align and blend the sections automatically; tidy any seams by hand afterwards. Pieces up to around 18 by 24 inches stitch well this way. Beyond that, alignment and lighting consistency get harder, and photography or a professional scan becomes the better option.

When to photograph instead

Scanning is for flat work. Reach for a camera when the piece is heavily textured (thick impasto, raised mixed media), genuinely three-dimensional, on canvas or board too rigid to lie on the glass, or simply too large to stitch reliably. A scanner flattens and front-lights everything, which kills the very texture that gives some work its character. In those cases a properly lit, squared-on photograph — ideally with a colour chart in frame for reference — will represent the work far more honestly than forcing it onto a scanner bed.

Pick the tool that matches the work, capture it once at archival quality, and everything downstream — prints, products, listings — inherits that care.