How to Scan Original Artwork for High-Quality Art Prints
Most artists get this wrong and end up with blurry, off-color prints.
If you want to sell art prints (or even just make prints for yourself), the quality of your scan is everything. A bad scan means blurry lines, washed-out colors, and prints you'll be embarrassed to hand to a customer. A good scan means clean, sharp reproductions you can scale up to poster size without losing a single detail.
I've been making art prints from my scanned original illustrations for years, and I've made all the rookie mistakes so you don't have to. Here are the three settings that will make or break the quality of your art prints: file format, scan resolution, and color mode.
Tip 1: How to choose the right file format for scanning artwork
When you open your scanner software, you'll see file format options like JPEG, PNG, PDF, and TIFF. This choice matters more than most artists realize.
Use TIFF for your print files. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a lossless format, meaning it preserves every detail of your scan without compressing or degrading the image. It handles high color depth well, keeps all your image data intact, and is compatible with virtually every professional printing workflow and editing software.
JPEG is a lossy format. Every time you save a JPEG, it throws away image data to make the file smaller. That's fine for uploading artwork to Instagram, but it's a problem when you're trying to produce a high-quality art print. The compression artifacts will show up in your final print, especially in areas with fine lines or subtle color gradients.
Quick guide:
TIFF → art prints, archival files, sending to a professional printer
PDF → acceptable alternative if TIFF isn't available
JPEG / PNG → social media, website thumbnails, online publishing only
One more thing: your scanner may offer an 8-bit or 16-bit color option. Stick with 8-bit. The color range that modern printing technology can reproduce hasn't caught up to 16-bit, so the extra data won't make your prints look better. It'll just make your files unnecessarily large.
Tip 2: How to scan artwork at the right resolution for printing
Resolution is the most common place artists get tripped up, and it's the one mistake that costs you real money at the printer.
Scan your original artwork at 600 DPI (dots per inch). Here's why that number matters: if you scan an 8×10 piece at 600 DPI, you'll have enough resolution to enlarge that print to 16×20 and still stay above the 300 DPI minimum required for sharp, professional-quality printing. That means you can offer multiple print sizes from a single scan.
300 DPI is the baseline minimum for print quality. Scanning at that resolution gives you no room to scale up. If you hand a low-res file to your printer and ask for a large print, you'll get a blurry mess.
The key rule: always set your DPI in the scanner, not in Photoshop. Increasing DPI after the scan in photo editing software (called "upsampling") does not add real image data. It interpolates, which means it guesses, and the result is a soft, degraded image. Get it right in the scan step.
DPI quick reference for scanning artwork:
300 DPI → minimum for print; no room to enlarge
600 DPI → recommended; allows scaling up to 2× the original size
1200 DPI → for very small originals or extremely large poster prints
Tip 3: How to convert artwork to CMYK for print
This is the tip that separates artists who get great-looking prints from those who spend money reprinting because the colors came out wrong.
RGB vs. CMYK: here's the short version:
Computer monitors display color using RGB (Red, Green, Blue) light. Printers reproduce color using CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) ink. These two color systems have very different gamuts. RGB can display millions of colors that CMYK inks simply cannot reproduce in print.
What that means in practice: if you send an RGB file to a printer, you're essentially asking the printer to guess how to translate your colors into ink. Colors will shift. Vibrant blues might print dull. Bright reds can go muddy. The print will look "off" compared to what you saw on screen.
Convert your scan to CMYK before sending it to print. In Photoshop, go to Image → Mode → CMYK Color. This gives you and your printer accurate, predictable color output.
Your prints still won't look 100% identical to what you see on a monitor, because no print ever does. But converting to CMYK gets you as close as possible and eliminates most of the guesswork.
Scanning Checklist for Art Prints
Before you send anything to a printer, run through this:
✅ File format set to TIFF in your scanner software
✅ Scan resolution set to 600 DPI minimum
✅ Saved as a single-layer file (keeps the TIFF size manageable)
✅ Color mode converted to CMYK in Photoshop before export
✅ File inspected at 100% zoom for dust, hairs, or scanner artifacts
Final Thoughts
Scanning original artwork for prints doesn't have to be complicated, but those three settings (TIFF format, 600 DPI resolution, CMYK color mode) are non-negotiable if you want clean, professional-quality results. Get those right and you'll save yourself a lot of wasted print runs. If you want to see what's possible when the scan is done right, check out the shop. All my prints start as scanned original marker illustrations. Your support keeps this site going.
— Ivan
