I've been trying to scan in an inked drawing so that it can be professionally printed. Every time I set the print resolution to 300 dpi it copies into my editor at a massive magnification. So after trying to sort this out on two different scanners I finally gave up and decided I needed to get some help on this.

I know it must sound really stupid to those of you who do stuff like this all the time but I don't want to end up wasting loads of time by getting this wrong. I could scale it down but would that mess with up the dpi once it's in my editing program?

Someone help me please!

Are you using Indexed Color?

Also, a moniter is about 72DPI.

I'm kinda confused on what exactly is going wrong so I'm just going to give you a process that will hopefully help.

In your Scan Tool (whatever software your scanner came with) set your color to grayscale and your DPI to 600. Scan in and import to your image program. Now, if your image program is good you should be able to resize down to 300 DPI and the right dimensions.

If that doesn't sound like it'll fix it maybe telling us what editor you're using and scanner programs might help. ^_^

When you scan at 300 dpi it will appear enormous on your screen. Your screen displays at 72 dpi so it is basically going to be 4 times larger than what you'd expect.

I'm not aware of a way to scale it down to color it and then scale it back up without losing image data.

So then, if I was submitting this to be published I would just keep it at the super large value of 300 dpi and expect them to print it at the right size?

At the very least. And make sure you don't use Indexed color! That was a nightmare for me...

So the file I submit to be posted should be set at 76 and the one I keep for my recoreds should be 300+?

Yup, pretty much. 72.

While I don't have a scanner, I always Work on my images in a much larger dpi the the final sized object. Wheather it be Game Textures or the stupid little comic strips I do. So if your scanning your image into ink, color and letter. I would for sure recommend increasing you desktop resolutions, and setting the scanner to scan for Grayscale.

If you've inked and colourized already on the page it self. god help you, no really it not that bad. but it will make a huge multi coloured massive HDD eating image. if you want the image more at what the monitor call an inch. 72dpi as everyone has said is good maybe about 10-20 more might help but it really up to the artist and how detailed the source is.

IF you going to scan an image in at 300dpi, this image will be huge, there is no other way around this.