How do you get hand-drawn images to scan in to the computer well?

 

I'm working on some black ink line work that I need to get scanned in for colouring etc. But in past experience scanning hand-drawn ahd always ended up rather messy. Any tips?

Well once your physical copy is cleaned up and inked, the rest really comes from touching up in PhotoShop. Use levels to sort out your colours and increase the contrast. Beyond that it's kind of hard to give you suggestions without actually seeing an example of a "messy" scan and knowing all the steps you went through already.

Edit the contrast and brightness, that's what I do, essentially turning my ink lines, which vary in actual color in shades of gray, and just turn them all black; then magic wand out the background - which is totally white now.

Ah I get ya so essentially blow it out so pencil marks etc go to white and all the ink goes pure black; then use brushes, blurs etc. etc. to tidy up any bits that look a bit messy. Ty muchly! Kinda obvious stuff, but given my lack of a decent scanner previously and been doing very little handart just couldn't think how to do it!

Tbh I'm so lazy I just take pics of my art with a decent camera [mine's 7 mp] and put them onto the computer; my scanner also sucks and the computer it's on isn't much better.

I kinda figured you can do it with a camera too, thanks to an app on my phone called "camscanner" plus "picsaypro" I managed to tweet the beginnings of the art work I'll later be inking and scanning and it's actually quite clear!

 

Depends what you want it for really, if you want the thick black outline and solid lines that can be scaled for print (vector) then playing around with the livetrace option in Illustrator may be your best bet. Otherwise I'd stick to adjusting levels and colour levels in Photoshop until you have it how you like it.