: Taking a photo from a high res camera instead of scanning Can I just take a photo of my sketch to work on it further in Illustrator rather than scanning it? Is scanning necessary even if

@Turnbaugh909

Whatever works.

There's no international governing review system that will tell you your art or the way you create it is wrong. If you can accomplish what you want or need to accomplish with a camera rather than a scanner, go for it.

I've taken very grainy, dark, low resolution photos from a cheap cell phone of doodles on a napkin in order to take them into Illustrator to redraw. When the art is finished, no one would be able to tell how it started.

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@Cugini998

Yes, it has however some possible problems.


The camera needs to be placed as much in front of image as possible, or you will get a bad perspective distortion. Place on a wall, and use a tripod its easiest.
You need good lightning conditions, this eliminates noise and allows you to use good depth of field. Beware that the position of light may cause your image to have specular highlights. for this end use reflected light if possible. Test lightning conditions or you will get a color gradient across the image. Bounce light from a white wall (opposite). Or fix in Photoshop.
The resolution is limited compared the the line camera of the scanner, that can take more pixels the bigger your drawing is. Whereas cameras resolution is fixed, no matter how big your image.


As you can see there are many advantages to a scanner. It has a permanent setup time sure but so does camera. The camera may be faster in big batches of pages, if your scanner does not have a feeder or you need to turn pages and have remote launch. The camera can also be setup to auto shoot pictures once the image stabilizes so it can be good for things like animation and/or bills if you have a table setup with camera above (i use this to pay paper bills, just put them on table and your set).

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