Art Print Appreciation

Depending on what kind of art. If it is flat and is flexible, you can get it “drum” scanned. Although it is costly, it does offer you the best quality for enlarging.

If it is not able to wrap around a drum, then you can get a good photographer and enlarge photos…

The real key is to design the work with the full size in mind. Blowing up small pieces of art to extremely large size often produces disappointing results. Small pixels, (after scanning) become big, ugly, jaggedy pixels. Details get lost. Print quality suffers.

If the image is created large enough, from the beginning, it will suffer less after enlargement.

In the meantime, if your pieces can be scanned, be sure that it is done in the highest resolution possible. Do not pay attention to anyone who tells you that a fixed number, such as 300 ppi, all you need. A nine by twelve inch image, scanned to 300 ppi will not enlarge as well as an eighteen by twenty image scanned at 300 ppi. Not just ppi, but the more TOTAL pixels in an image, the better the enlargement.

For large scale scanning, I take my original work to a professional service bureau, like an industrial print shop. Otherwise, I design my digital art to fit the final project size, and then take the file to the printer’s.