Photoshop Tutorial: How To Scan and Adjust Your Final Artwork

Learn how to scan your final artwork in sections and digitally stitch it together in Photoshop with Jon Berkeley

There’s something special about making something with your hands, but one of the sometimes frustrating aspects of analog art is that it can be difficult to capture all of its detail when sharing it in a portfolio or online.

Illustrator and author Jon Berkeley (@jon_24) has illustrated over 150 covers for The Economist and worked with outlets like Time, GQ, Newsweek, and the Washington Post. One fundamental part of his job, beyond creating clever and captivating pieces, is creating high-quality image files of his analog artwork.

In this tutorial, he demonstrates how to easily and accurately scan and stitch together analog illustrations using Photoshop, without losing any of the image’s quality or detail.

How to Scan and Stitch Together Your Artwork in Photoshop

1. When working with a large piece of artwork that requires multiple scans, it’s important to leave as much overlap between scans as possible, since you will use this identical area to stitch them together later.

2. To avoid scanner distortion, which happens along the outer edge of the scanner, when you make your second scan, rotate the paper 180 degrees. Essentially, make sure that the new part you are scanning is in the back of the scanner, and the area with the overlap is closer to the outer edge.

3. Open both images in Photoshop. Because you scanned them ‘sideways’ according to the scanner, rotate them accordingly by going to Image>Image Rotation.

4. In the scan that shows the bottom half of the image, go to Image>Canvas Size. Move the anchor point down and increase the height. Don’t worry about making it too tall since you can crop later.

5. Drag the scan of the top half of the image onto the scan of the lower half. This will create a new layer. Adjust this top layer to 50% opacity.

6. Zoom in to the area where the top image overlaps with the bottom one. Focus on a point on one side, and try to line up a small detail as sharply as possible.

7. Go to Edit>Transform>Rotate to open the rotation tool. Make sure the box in the upper left corner of the menu is selected, which will allow you to see the center point (which appears in the center of the image and looks like a crosshair).

8. Click and drag this center point and place it on the detail you lined up. Then zoom in on the opposite side of the image, and use the rotation tool to line up that side of the overlap. You can use your arrow keys to create small, controlled rotations.

9. To remove any scanner distortion at the edge of your scan, use the Lasso tool and give it a Feather of 6 pixels, which will create a softer edge. Circle the area in the center of your scan overlap, avoiding areas with sharp detail.

10. Increase the opacity of your top layer to 100%, then merge your layers to create a single image layer.

11. If you made pencil guide marks on your original illustration, you can use them to see if the larger image needs to be rotated. Go to View>Ruler, then pull down a guide from the ruler bar.

12. Select the entire image using Command+A, then open the rotation tool and place the center point on the place where the guide and pencil mark meet, using small adjustments to line up the guide and pencil mark on the other side.

13. Crop your illustration to remove the margin, but make sure not to crop it too closely since the background can be useful for the art director who is receiving the piece.

14. Save your file in a .tiff format to preserve its quality, to continue working and editing it without compromising the image quality. If you need to send or upload a smaller file, you can then use Save As to save it as a high-res .jpg.

Did you enjoy this tutorial? If you'd like to learn more about how to develop conceptual illustrations from scratch, check out Jon Berkeley's online course Acrylic Techniques for Creative Illustration.

You May Also Be Interested In:

- Digital Fantasy Portraits with Photoshop, a course by Karmen Loh (Bearbrickjia)
- Digital Painting for Characters: Color and Light, a course by Joel Santana
- Adobe Photoshop for Illustration, by Gemma Román
- Lighting Principles for Digital Painting, a course by Samuel Smith