Re-sizing scanned lineart without it pixellating.

[RobSkitt]

Hi I've got a problem for my major artwork I'm doing for school...I am doing line art on paper and scanning it at 300dpi (my scanners max) and am needing to blow the pictures up to about 125-150% , purely because I'm sending them to a company that will put them onto an underlay for a surfboard for me. How hard is it to do...is it possible or do I need to go somewhere that has better equipment....any help would be much appreciated.
I can't post the pictures at a later date if any one needs? Cheers[/img]

[xDabombx]

yeah you can resize it with photoshop... but it is better to do it with adobe illustrator. maybe you could ask someone in the illustrator section, or you could post it here, i could try to do it but it wont look as good, there is always gonna be some quality loss when making it bigger in photoshop.

[Retro Art]

Dear RobSkitt,

From my experience, line art are the most deceptive things to scan. They appear to be straightforward, but upon close inspection you tend to see a lot of unwanted "noise" and artifacts.

My advice would be to scan it first and foremost at a reso no lower than 600 dpi if possible. Secondly, scan at 16 bits per channel if you scanner allows. Thirdly, do not crank up the contrast although it does make the whites whiter and the darks darker; kep it at a moderate level so that your paper colour ends up light gray and your ink colours dark gray.

To get the colours right, use the levels command and assign the white dropper tool to your paper area and the black dropper tool to an area covered with ink. Because you are "crunching down the number of brightness values, this is where scanning in 16 bit comes in handy. while in 8 bit you potentially could have lost about 20% of your colour variations, in 16 bits you have lost non when you convert it back to an 8 bit at this point of time.

Lastly, if you do have to blow up your image, do it in image>image size and make sure you have bicubic smoother turned on. Personally, I would do it in Illustrator since it is a piece of line art. Applying a live trace converts your line art to a vector graphics which allows you to blow it up as big as you want.

Hope it helps

[peejah]

I'd stick to Illustrator's "Live Trace" options found in CS2 and above....and if you need color you can just bring it into Photoshop as a smart object.....or you can do the color in Illustrator,with a layer underneath your vectored line drawing.....

I do a lot of free hand, and I always "Live Trace" then depending on the looking I'm going for I'll either color in Illustrator or Photoshop.

Another good option, if your line drawing isn't very detailed or complicated, is to redraw the drawing with the pen tool, using your scan, on a under layer, as a template (i.e. www.peejah.net)