I gather the idea is to scan at the highest resolution possible: ideally, you want 300dpi or 600dpi, TIFF format. Apart from that, it's fairly easy.

You could run it through a contrast filter if you wanted a completely white background.

I stand to be corrected, of course.

Graham

Photo art is fine at 300 dpi but line art is best at 600 dpi.

So, scan the art at 600 dpi, then I use the following tricks...
(i) adjust "brightness/contrast" so that the lines are more distinct
(ii) use "unsharp mask" to again make the lines sharper (and sometimes use "Gaussian Blur" first or repeat both these a couple of times)
(iii) convert from "grayscale" to "bitmap" mode, using 50% threshhold.

That seems to work for me.

You end up with a small TIFF file, that is a 600-dpi monochrome bitmap and is supersharp in a PDF without adding much weight to the file.

*I'm using "dpi", yes, I know it's actually ppi, but everyone uses dpi when they mean ppi.

Reminds me of Metallica Garage Days... in all the good ways.

There're a lot of effects you can use to make images seem a little more neat and tidy if you've got the right packages. I'm no great artist myself though so my tastes in such things are probably a touch plebian for many. Best thing I can suggest for now is to drag it into photoshop and experiment with a few filters, especially blurring and sharpening.

Ash

Aye, scan at as high a resolution as your machine can handle. The more information you can cram into the initial scan the better. Never scan greyscale/photo images below 300 though, and aim for 600. Line art really needs a minimum of 600 for nice clean results.

Of course for an ashcan you might want to keep things punk looking and not work too hard on cleaning things up. And stuff like a colour halftone filter in PS can add a lovely cheap repro look to sketches if you really want to run with that particular ball.

Ok the rest of this ramble assumes the reader has Photoshop. Not quite sure how you can do the whole art department thing without it or something similar, and Photoshop Elements has a lot of these features and is dirt cheap.

When you "bump down" the resolution to print size its worth using a sharpen filter in PS to really crisp it up. But the results can be a bit too much, so its worth copying and pasting the whole image as a new layer, sharpening the layer, and reducing its opacity to maybe 50% or less so that its not so sharp that its tearing your eyeballs.

Learning to use "levels" in Photoshop, and then "curves" is a really good skill to acquire. Brightness/Contrast sliders are ok, but levels are better, and curves are better again but a bit hard to use. This is all in a grossly generalised way - different tools are good for different jobs, and a book like Photoshop for Dummies is an ideal guide - I use it all the time, since PS is sooooooooo vast.

As a super-duper high speed tutorial on using levels to clean up line art in PS:

1:Open your image in Photoshop
2: Hit command/Control L, or select "levels" from "image" >"adjustments">"levels"
3: Under the graph you see appear there are three little arrow sliders. Move the right hand one a little to the left, and it will clean up any light marks, making them white.
4: Move the left hand slider a little to the right, and that darkens your darks
5: Experiment by moving the middle arrow, which controls your mid tones left and right a little until it looks good.
6: Click the tick box next to "preview", so that the tick disappears, to check how your changes look. Click the preview on and off just to make sure you are improving the image.
7: hit "ok".

Its good to make a copy of your images to experiment with, rather than destroying your actual scans by mistake! Its also good practice to copy the whole image, paste it in as a new layer and alter the copied layer, rather than the image on the canvas. That way you keep the original a little longer just in case, and for comparison purposes.

A really fast and dirty tip is to copy and paste the whole image, set the new layer to "multiply" and adjust the opacity to maybe 50%. Darkens your darks nicely. It also adds to the "dirt" if its not a very clean image, so you have to be careful doing that, but sometimes its helpful.

Jon Hodgson
www.jonhodgson.net

Jon,

Brilliant!

Thanks mate, I'm actually using a geeky open source package called Gimp, but it has a similar Levels thing and seems to clean the images up nicely. At least, nicely enough for this edition.

Here's a cleaned up version of the Classic image:

And the old one for comparison:

Well that seemed to work out ok! :)

Jon Hodgson
www.jonhodgson.com