Why Scanning Your Artwork Beats a Photo (And What 600 DPI Actually Means)

September 02, 2026
Posted by Jarrad Miller

Every artist's done it. You prop the painting against a wall, angle your phone, take fifteen photos hunting for the one where the light doesn't wash out the colour, and upload the least-bad one anyway. Good enough for Instagram.

But what happens when good enough isn't good enough — when you need a file for a giclée print, a gallery submission, a licensing deal, or an archival record that'll outlive the original?

Why a photo isn't the same as a scan

A camera lens introduces problems you can't really fix after the fact:

Lens distortion. Even a good lens bends slightly at the edges of the frame — straight canvas edges come out very slightly curved.
Uneven light. Getting flat, even light across a large piece without hotspots or shadows takes proper lighting gear. Most of us are working with whatever's coming through the studio window.
Colour drift. Camera sensors don't see colour the way your eye does, and different light sources shift the colour temperature. What looks right on your phone can print completely wrong.
Focus fall-off. If your work has texture — heavy brushwork, raised paint — a lens focuses on one plane. Anything sitting slightly proud or recessed can go soft.

A flatbed scanner sidesteps all of it. There's no lens to distort anything — a row of sensors passes directly over the artwork at a fixed distance, under controlled, even light, recording what's actually there instead of interpreting it through glass.

What 600 DPI actually gets you

DPI — dots per inch — is how much image information gets captured per inch of your artwork. At 600 DPI, a 50cm × 70cm painting produces a file of roughly 195 megapixels. A 12-megapixel phone photo of the same piece captures under 2% of that. That's the practical difference between a file that reproduces your work faithfully at full size — or enlarged well beyond it — and one that starts falling apart above A4.

We scan at 600 DPI as standard, with 1200 DPI available on request, and our flatbed handles work up to 2 metres — oil, acrylic, watercolour, pencil, mixed media, all of it. At that resolution, your file can be enlarged up to 4 times the original size without losing what made the piece good in the first place.

When you actually need a proper scan

Not everything needs archival scanning — a decent phone photo is genuinely fine for a quick Instagram post. You need a real scan when:

You're producing giclée prints or a limited edition
You're submitting to a gallery, publication, or grant application
You're licensing your work and need a file that holds up across repeated use
You're building a permanent archive of your originals — for insurance, estate planning, or just peace of mind
You're handing a file to a printer or framer who needs exact, undistorted dimensions

Our three tiers

Raw Scan — from $55. A high-resolution, unprocessed file, straight off the scanner. You keep full control if you're comfortable doing your own post-production.
Basic Scan — from $77. Standard colour correction, a basic retouch, master file, JPEGs, and an A4 fine art proof.
Full Service Scan — from $99. Expert colour matching, detailed retouching, and a full file set — proofed until it genuinely matches your original, not just gets close. Fully print-ready, nothing left for you to do.

Every file is colour-managed in-house against your actual artwork, by a team who print fine art giclée on these exact papers every day — so we know precisely what a file needs to look right once it hits paper, not just on a screen.