Scanning in my own paintings :)

Question

Hi there,
I want to scan my own paintings, and reproduce them/ make prints. Up until now I've only ever scanned my line drawings in Illustrator, and have never experiemented with photoshop. What's the easiest way to go about it?
I don't really want to edit anything, I just need it to look clean enough to print copies.....drop the background, any paper markings etc...but still want it to look like my painting obviously!
I would appreciate ANY help at all
Thanks!
Emma

Answer 1

One thing you might want to do is to opened the scanned file in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).  You can do this from Bridge by selecting the image and pressing ctrl/cmd-R, or by right clicking on the image and selecting "open with camera raw."  This will give you a lot of great tools to adjust your image: brightness, contrast, vibrance, etc.  You can also do corrections in Photoshop.  I would use adjustment layers, which create a special layer that can be re-edited.  Curves would be my first choice to correcting the iamge, as it give you the most control for adjusting the colors of the shadows, midtones, and highlights differently.  However, a lot of people get intimidatated by them.  Once you use them a few time, you can get the hang of them.  You can also adjust the saturation and or vibrance with another adjustment layer.  As far as "Lifting" the painting off the paper background, I'm assuming that you don't have straight edges, and would like to have what just what you painted on it's own layer.  That all depends upon your image what would be the best way.  There is a lot of ways to do that, so it comes down to personal preference for a lot of it.