http://img385.imageshack.us/img385/4206/958206pcgames0930shiro0ty5.jpg

i managed to get my hands on the artbook in the photo, inside the book there's a symphonic rain photo (the original holding hands boxart) i'd like to print out in an enlarged size, if possible medium poster size. how do i do that?

help me, and i'll contribute my scan to the symphonic section of this site, which really needed the boxart in my opinion as the poster collection here is so complete, with only 1 missing. help me and i'mm get it scanned and give it to the site owner. my current place of residence is canada.

We have plenty of people here who can help. Looking forward to seeing the scan!

*buy a scanner
*put artbook on scanner
*scan
*post result
*post scanner settings

would be the very first step
of course best scan result can only be achieved if you debind the artbook somehow
if the pic is smaller than the artbook and fits without bending, youre even luckier

other than that, wheres the prob?

Well, I can tell you how I scan. I have a Epson Perfection 4490 photo scanner, I use it in professional mode which gives me control over all it's functions. I scan a @ 600dpi minimum and the file output is jpeg but some prefer png for better image correction in photoshop or other image editing program. I use the histogram adjustment and tone correction functions to adjust light, dark, contrast gamma etc etc. Histogram has input functions which are eyedroppers in my program. For dark, grey and light tones of the image. For dark I usually pick the darkest area I can find usually near the eyes, the pupil or eyebrows but sometimes any dark area will do. It's just a matter of trial and error to find the right look. Light is the same method, but finding the lightest area and normally I will pick either the highlight in the eye or the white of the eye. But again any white spot might do and again it's trial and error. Tone correction has linear, lighten, darken, flat contrast, high contrast, open shadow and a few of my own settings. Again it's a matter of trial and error to see what you like and don't like. Then it's a matter of adjusting your scanning area to minimize the amount that may have to be cropped out later. I also have unsharp mask and descreening filters that attempt to minimize the moire effect from scanners. Some folks don't use the descreening filter and let their image editing program deal with it. My suggestion to you is scan it, post it, and let the photoshop pros do the editing.

I also should mention that where jpeg might put out a 20mb file, it's png equivalent will be a lot larger, maybe up to 3x as much depending on the image being scanned. And you might be better off to just scan in your scanners basic mode at least until you learn what it can and can't do then tackle the more in-depth stuff. And there are tutorials out there and I do believe dovac has one, or, that might be a debinding tutorial ...

Difficult to do without losing quality.

Though it's stingy of me to say this. I would prefer and recommend you save it as PNG to preserve quality since jpeg have lack the quality that PNG has.

From what I know about printing, a smaller file will not turn out as good as a larger file will. That's using a jpeg file. Other formats such as RAW and TIFF will probably turn out better printed matter over jpeg but are very large in file (in mb) size. It's as aoie says, jpeg is a compression format and gets rid of certain information to get the smaller file size. So if you want to print a jpeg file it'll need to be very large file size as in 4000 X 6000 as opposed to 800 x 600. Also, the compression ration of the jpeg file will play a role too. Professional printing places might be able to do more with a file than the average Joe can. And they might have stipulations about the picture you want printed.

Here's a link http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html
And Wikipedia's take http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_file_format
And you can check this out http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/scanning.html

For my scan, I go with 1200dpi in PNG, no descreening ( my scanner really doesn't seem to descreen anyway... ) . Then I use Noise Ninja to remove most of the artifact. After, either it's a small Gaussian Blur ( 1px) or a Median Noise ( up to 3px ) if more artefact and finally some sharpening.

I don't do any color manipulation except converting color profile. Some software just doesn't support PNG's gamma correction.

if your scanning and plan to work with the scans, TIFF is your ONLY friend, DO NOT save it as jpeg ABOSLUTLY NEVER, and PNG is not to prefer either, Why? Because all those format you lose quite a lot of important information while you work and edit your scans, TIFF is made for scanning pretty much. PNG and JPG work fine as an end result, but NEVER use them while you work with the pictures! NEVER.

Also don't go complete overkill on to high DPI, most cases on printed books you will hit the max around 300-600 DPI where the rez just become so high that you start to cell the ink cells and at this point is kind of ueless to scan higher, and the quality if the picture kind of get gross by smoting it out to much after here on to. Some books you can scan higher but it depence on the quality of there printing.

But yeah this is just my preference, I'm mostly just been working with black/white ( aka Doujinshis ) rater the color art, over 900+ to be exact )

the whitepaper book above could be color it could also be black and white as that circle seems to release both types quite often. Love there art thought :P

If it's black and white I can write a ton of more advice on how to clear up pictures, make them look like they where original ink drawings while not destroy to much of the shadows and os fort.

Here's the difference between jpeg and TIFF. I scanned an image of Yoko from Gurren Lagann that is 5x3.5 @ 600dpi and 1200dpi. Both images came out at 2987x2074 @600dpi. The jpeg topped out at 3.45mb while the TIFF topped out at 17.8mb. And at 1200dpi the images came out at 5974x4148 but the jpeg was 34.1mb and the TIFF file was 70.9mb. My scanner doesn't output to PNG so I can't show the difference there. My old one did but not this one. So output is dependant on how much drive space you have. If you have lots of hard drive space, or don't plan on keeping them for very long, by all means save them as TIFF's. Or if you plan on doing image manipulation TIFF would be the way to go. Then again, it's all up to the person doing the scanning ...