[ImStillHere]

Hi folks,

I'm really glad a forum like this exists. Been making good use of a post by Pat concerning maintaining pencil quality in scans. Thanks!

I was wondering if anybody could advise me on the following:

I'm working on an illustrated music video to a song of mine. It's not animated as such - will be more like a slide show - one drawing per line of the lyrics. It's very nearly finished so am moving on to the scanning stage now and it's all very exciting.

What I need to know is: how do I resize my scans to a sensible size for inclusion in a youtube video without losing any resolution/detail? I'm scanning them in with an Epson Perfection 330 scanner in 24-bit colour mode at 600dpi. My understanding of dpi was a little skewed it appears as I thought the higher this number, the higher the resolution but it seems to just mean that I get gigantic files - 7,000 x 4,000 pixels for example. If I were to shrink these pictures/files in photoshop, would I lose any quality/definition?

Thanks in advance for any know-how!
Mike

[Sumaleth]

'dpi' is only applicable when printing or scanning--you can think of it as a way to convert a physical, real-world size (-square inch) into pixels that a computer can manipulate (dots per-).

So if you have a real-world image that is 1x1 inch and you scan it at 600dpi, then the resulting image in the computer will be 600x600 pixels.

Or, to go the other way, if you have a 1000x1000 pixels image in the computer and you print it at 300dpi, the resulting real-world image will be 3.33x3.33 inches.

I don't know what YouTube's maximum resolution is, but if it's (for example) 1024x800 then there is no way to get more detail into the resulting image than what is present in an image of 1024x800. But you would want to scan your images at least as big as that maximum resolution. If you scan smaller, you will lose detail when it is resized larger.

Even when resizing down you can introduce a slight blur, which could wash out the finest detail. If that's a problem you might want to try to scan at the target resolution, so no resizing is required, or you could try running a "sharpen" filter on the image after the resize, to bring out the details again.

Also be aware that YouTube has (at least) two supported resolutions--there's the resolution they call "HD", which has the best image and sound quality, plus the standard, small resolution. You'll find it very difficult to get the finest details in YouTube's small resolution, no matter how you go about it.
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[ImStillHere]

Thankyou Sumaleth, those are very helpful points. I'm glad I scanned them at a huge resolution as they will all need to shrunk and cropped to fit the video player.

Will post a link when I've overcome all of these analog-digital issues and the finished piece is done!