 Welcome to MAPCRO, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle, and today we are talking about scanning. I work physically. I work on actual paper with actual pens, as I'm sure you can tell. But in order to distribute my work at all, everything has to go into the computer eventually. And there are a couple of steps that some folks might not be aware of that will help that transition from traditional media to digital media go smoothly. When drawing isometric maps, I like to print out my own grid paper on Bristol board, and I like to use blue pencil to kind of rough in everything, and then kind of do finished micron pen on top of that to get really crisp, clean artwork. I don't have to erase, I don't have to worry about smudging. I kind of let each tool do what it does best. Now, I never want these printed lines or blue pencil lines to ever show up in the final artwork, and removing them is a very simple process, but if you kind of don't take care from the beginning, it won't be as easy, and the final artwork will look like garbage. And we don't want that, especially when it takes so dang long to draw all these maps. The first step to getting nice, crisp, clean scans is to make sure that your scanner is crisp and clean. Spray some glass cleaner directly onto the rag, and then use as little as possible to clean the glass. You don't want any streaks, you don't want any residue, you want the glass to be perfectly dry by the time you're done wiping it off. Make sure you are spot checking for little specks of dust, or little bits of ink that maybe weren't dry when you slapped it onto the scanner plate in the first place. I'm using a very old, all-in-one scanner from Brother. It's like 12 years old or something like that, but it still does the job. If there's any pesky things kind of still sticking to the glass, if you take the flat end of a razor blade and kind of like drag it across at an angle, it will kind of pick up any kind of remaining gunk that is on your scanner plate. Now, I don't like to put my paper directly against the edge of the scanner to make sure it's square, because sometimes it doesn't get to those first couple of rows of pixels, and it can kind of crop down my image and stuff that I drew at the edge of the page won't show up. So I'll use a ruler to kind of space it out and leave a nice square edge that's just kind of floating out in the middle of the scanner plate. Now, the exact programs and software that you're going to use for this might change depending on your setup, but the basics of what I am telling you are going to be true and are going to help you find the process that is best for your art. So I just use the scanning app that comes with Windows 10. I always scan as a PNG, it's a nice portable lossless format. I scan at 600 dpi so that I can get a really nice big print of it, and you always want to reduce, you never want to increase size. So if you make a big scan, if something happens to the original, you're all set. I do not adjust the brightness or contrast, and I always scan in color. I don't want the scanner making creative decisions for me. I'm going to be making all of those adjustments later in Photoshop. So here I'm just getting a preview image of the scan so that I can tell the scanner here is specifically what I want you to scan at full resolution. Next, let's take a look at what is actually happening when a scanner scans something. I don't recommend lifting up the hood while you're scanning things, and it might be very dangerous for your eyes. So be careful, but this is just for demonstration purposes. When the optical sensors or the camera comes by, it has a lighting mechanism that bounces light indirectly into your image. Your image needs to be flat against the scanner plate, otherwise it'll be out of focus. Everything is designed to capture an image that is flat against the plate. This is another great reason to have the cover down. But because the light is being bounced off at an indirect angle, even lustrous things like graphite or sparkles are not going to kind of blow out the image. It's going to be captured in kind of all of its depth without that flash photography shine kind of blasting straight back into the optical sensors. And this gives you more information. It gives you a clearer image that you can play with later. Now you don't need Photoshop to do this next step. And in fact, I think Clip Studio or Affinity or Procreate are probably going to be able to do very similar things. I'm just going to adjust the actual image size to crop out the stuff I didn't need to scan. And this will be, you know, an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. So it will print out at actual size later. Then I'm going to rotate the canvas. And so it's all kind of going in the right direction. Now if we zoom in, we can see that this image is in fact in color. And we can see the blue pencils and we can see these yellow grid lines that I had printed out on this sheet. This is why we scan in color is because we can select these colors and then drop them out by going into image, adjust, replace color. I can use the eyedropper to select the colors that I want to change. So I have kind of like this deep cyan blue and I increase the brightness all the way up to white. And that's going to do it. And then I can hit the plus eyedropper and also select that yellow. And we can see we can kind of get rid of everything that isn't this dark gray color. Now everything that is that dark gray color, it looks gray, but it is in fact lots of different very desaturated colors. So we're going to do two things. We're going to completely desaturate the image down to gray scale by using the hue saturation brightness panel. And then we're going to adjust our levels. Now levels is going to take all of the value and kind of adjust things with these with these sliders to make certain certain values past a certain point absolute black or absolute white. And that's really going to make this image look crisp. So this left slider is going to make everything below that turn absolutely black and everything to the right of the white carrot is going to turn everything absolutely white. That middle carrot is going to kind of change the tendency. And by adjusting those so everything looks looks absolutely sharp and perfect. And we can see kind of the stair step of those pixels when we're zoomed in. That's how we're going to get to the best possible image. This process might look a little bit different depending on what kind of medium and what kind of paper you're using. So if you're using gray scale or ink wash or watercolor or whatever, you're going to want to have to adjust these step by step to make sure that you're getting the best possible image. But the big reason that I like to do black and white liner in this way is it makes it way easier to make selections and color later on. But also it gives me a nice clean image that is very, very easy to read on a screen. But also if we print this out at a nice DPI, it is also going to look really beautiful and actually like enhance the contrast of what was actually put on to the page. If you have a different process or different suggestions for how to kind of improve upon or build upon what you what you've seen today. By all means, please share it in the comments. It might be a great resource for other people to be able to read as well. If you don't have access to a scanner plate like I do, you can go to OfficeMax. You can go to like a FedEx Kinko's or whatever and get things scanned in. And as long as you kind of know what the settings are going to do and how to get that nice high DPI lossless image, you'll be able to bring it back home and then throw it into Clip Art Studio or Affinity and be able to get pretty much the same results that I've demonstrated here. That's it for this episode. I hope you found this stuff useful. If you did, please leave me a like. Like I said, I would love to have a conversation about different tips and different file formats or whatever. What works for you? Let me know in the comments below. Subscribe if you would like to hear more art tutorials and technical tips. And maybe one day I'll meet you on the old roads. Farewell.