3 Quick Tips for Creating Better Quality Art Prints

Want better print?

It’s been a while, but I’m happy to be back with 3 quick tips to help you create better quality art prints from your scanned original art. If some of this gets a little technical please leave your questions below and i'll try to articulate better.

1. File format!

When choosing the file format of your scan, you will see several options such as JPEG, PNG, PDF or TIFF amongst others. I usually use PDF but prefer TIFF as it is a lossless and flexible format well suited for high color depth images. The Tiff format does tend to be large so keep your print file to one layer. The other available formats such as JPEG and PNG are usually better suited for images that will be used for online publishing.

Additionally, your scanner may give you and option to scan at 8bit (millions of colors) or 16bit (billions of colors). The color range for most printers has not caught up with the range that can be found in modern monitors so stick with 8bit.

2. Resolution!

This is really important, so listen up cause it will spare your from wasting money at the printers. I prefer to scan my originals at 600dpi. This allows me to enlarge my print files in case I want to make posters. Basically this means that if you scan in an 8x10 at 600dpi you should be able to enlarge it to 16x20 and stay above 300dpi. This may sounds like a no brainer but way to many artists make the mistake of handing the printer a low res file only to end up with blurry prints.

3. Color Mode!

The rule of thumb is that RGB is meant online publishing and CMYK is used for print.  Here’s why. Computer monitors have a much larger color gamut than printing and can display a million more colors than what can currently be achieved through printing. This means that RGB files stand a much higher chance of being off color in your prints. Prints will always look slightly off, but the trick is to make them as close as possible to the original.

Thanks for reading.

There you have it folks. Scan your original with a PDF or TIFF format at a resolution of 600dpi in CMYK color mode and you will be closer to producing prints with crystal clear colors and lines.  

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Your friendly neighborhood marker slinger,

Ivan-