How do you scan or make paintings digital?

Question

I recently finished some very large oil paintings on canvas, and I was considering starting a website where I can show off my work. How do I go about scanning my pictures? I want to make sure they are high quality, so how do all you guys out there do this? Do you just take a digital pic in a studio. Im new at this, so be kind...

Answer 1

Yes, I've found the only real way to do this is to take a picture of your painting with a high resolution digital camera.
You'll have to adjust lighting and stuff like that, since a black area in a painting can reflect the flash of a camera and then the black area "shines" in the picture, but you can figure that stuff out by trial and error. There aren't really any scanners I know of that can scan giant paintings.

Answer 2

Yes, I think that the best way is to take picture first, it could be digital which is much simpler, or you can find professional photographer which could take a picture on the film slide which basically is a film but bigger size and scan it after on professional scanner. Important point: If you really wanna get high quality images, don't go with file formats like *.jpeg (compressed image)- it's OK for the Internet, but if you decide later to publish your works in magazines you should go with *.tiff format, which is not compressed and basically the only format accepted by professional graphic designers.

Answer 3

Yes, If you have digital cam. take your painting place it in front of a wall with a contrasting color on it ,then take a picture of it. take it to walmart copy it off and then scan it in your computer. or if you have a card reader on your computer scan it that way. hope this helps, I do the same thing with my paintings......

Answer 4

the best way, is to get a good quality digital, 10megapixel...
take a few shots, and then open them up in photoshop
to alter the lighting, contrast, hue and saturation, then
save the images as pdf files or jpegs