Auraboo's lair

Originally posted on Pillowfort March 10th 2022.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how I edit my raw scans from start to finish to make them resemble the original traditional artwork as closely as possible. I've purposely chosen an illustration with a colour scheme that my scanner has the most trouble picking up: pinks and purples.

What we'll need:
- An artwork to scan
- A scanner (mine is CanoScanLiDE 220)
- An image editing software (I use Photoshop 7)
- A bit of time and patience

Special note: my OS and Photoshop are in Finnish. I've translated all tools and menus to my best ability in the description, but yours might be called something else - I haven't used Photoshop in English since 2012 so I'm operating on memory alone.



1. I start by scanning the image in 600 dpi straight to Photoshop. After scanning I have a raw scan that looks like this. I don't use any backlight correction options when scanning in order to preserve the translucent, soft hues that make watercolour washes so nice to use.

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tl;dr: Most raw scans are not usable or good-looking as is, at least not when scanning artwork (documents are a different thing entirely!). Don't be afraid to edit your raw scans - it's not cheating, and there's no scanning trick that makes your works come out of the scanner looking exactly like the original that some artists magically know and you don't. Know your scanner's weaknesses, such as what colours it has the most trouble picking, and plan your strategy around that.

I hope this was informative and makes the task of scanning and editing your traditional works less daunting. You can do it, I believe in you. Thanks for reading!