My Sister wants to scan some ink drawings into an editor, color them and put some text on them. Then she wants to send the results to a professional printing company to print up cards.
Should we be doing this in Illustrator instead of Photoshop and in vector graphics? What file format should we use? What scanner?
Thanks if you know.
Scanning will provide bitmaps. Photoshop does bitmaps; Illustrator does vectors. You can combine types, with some reservations.
Before getting too far along on this project, I suggest you talk to the printing company to see how they want to receive the data.
My experience in dealing with various printers as that they’ll be happy to get a photoshop file, but thrilled to get a vector (.ai) file. A vector file can be made as small or large as you want with no scaling issues.
Our business logo is saved in bmp and Jpeg for my own convenience, but then I also have a photoshop file and an Illustrator file. On top of that I also have it saved in Illustrator version 9 since one printer hadn’t upgraded yet to V10 at that time.
Also not that this is going to apply to you, but when I send my logo out for printing, the file also has the pantone colors listed right there in the image file so there’s no guess work or color matching (which adds expense) and it’ll look exactly how it’s supposed to look. My graphic artist also includes a B&W and monotone version so when we do a B&W or monotone version of the logo it looks like he wants it to look and not how the printer (or the printer’s computer) wants it to look. All this insures that when we have Kinko’s make brochures or a t-shirt company do silk screens or a hat company do embroidery it always looks the same.
TL;DR Get the AI file and as long as you’re there, get the PS and a Jpeg all at once. The printer will use the AI file, but it’s nice to have the other two since not everyone can work with all of them.
Vector graphics are always preferred.
If the line drawing is distinct against its background, without shading, Illustrator has a plugin that will convert a scan to a vector quite effectively. Otherwise there are online services that can do this sort of thing for free.
If you do have to use a bitmap (though a TIFF would be the best to send out to a printer), make sure it’s very high-res.
Just wanted to second the online service (I only saw one in that link), VectorMagic. It’s lightyears ahead of Illustrator in vectorization (that, not PS vs AI, is your real challenge). You might have to pay a little bit, but you can see the result before you do and that’ll probably convince you.
jjimm basically covered this and I’m sure you know it, but in case it wasn`t explicit enough for anyone inexperienced with graphics…
You can’t simply scan an ink drawing, import it to illustrator, and expect your AI file to please any printers. You have to vectorize your scan before it’ll make any difference.
Actually, I honestly didn’t. Though it makes sense. We used a professional design firm to create our logo and they handed it to us in vector format. I have PhotoShop and created the other files from the vector file (Photoshop can open an AI file). I just know from my dealings with various printers that they much prefer the AI file (since they can work with it without it getting all pixelated and jagged) and the one’s who say “Wot’s a Illustrator?” are the ones I choose not to use. Sure, I learned as I went, but if you’re in the biz, you best know more then I about graphics files.