Digitizing drawings

>>3115245
scanner is best

>>3115245
Scanner. A USB powered scanner is less than $100, or you can get one of those all-in-one inkjet/scanner deals for under $100. A DLSR and phone camera can do the resolution, but lighting will be inconsistent - lighting artwork is very specific and requires a bit of gear to do it right.

Unless you're using color systems and have your monitor calibrated, and scanner and printer calibrated together, I wouldn't worry about colors. Contrast can be controlled by the scanner settings, or Photoshop - I prefer to just dump whatever the scanner sees into a file, and I tweak it in Photoshop - the default settings may be fine for you.
Predicting what the shirt will look like is more about your monitor settings, and setting up profiles that can soft proof screen printing. The scanner/photo has nothing to do with that - you're better off working towards a ballpark goal in terms of color, and let the prepress guys handle color, unless you're speccing Pantones. Generally, if you give the prepress people a printed sample that's the correct colors and contrast that you want, they can match that. If you're just planning on sending files with no targets, get ready for extra charges for several rounds of color correction, or having work that isn't the way you intended.
Getting a soft proofing system at home is a whole nother issue, where you'll have to calibrate your monitor, and getting a decent printer, and setting up everything to print accurately - and learning how to design things within the gamuts of the systems you're working with - like asking the prepress people printing the shirts what their gamut is, so you can soft proof to it.

>>3115245
scanners are bad, don't listen to these people. because they use a huge bright light scanners shine through things that are opaque irl and reflect heavily off things that are quite matte irl. a photo in a neutral ambient light is best. hdr might also be quite useful, depending on the picture.

if you're just doing line art probably a scanner is fine.

i have actually worked digitizing art, just for the ol' appeal to authority

>>3115450
I have, too - I worked at a fine art publisher, where we photographed original art on a copy stand, on 4x5" and 8x10" backs, and then had the transparencies scanned for publication as posters and prints. The key to scanning opaque things is to have a white backing on them, which is why scanner covers have a - wait for it - white backing.

Shooting art in a "neutral, ambient light" is the most useless, idiotic piece of advice ever given here - and this forum gets really fucking stupid. HDR is fucking AWFUL for scanning artwork, what the fuck are you even talking about? Especially since it will be creating colors well outside the gamut of screen printing for t-shirts.
Nobody is talking about scanning watercolors for printing in art books, anyway, he (the OP) wants to scan artwork for T-shirts. A flatbed scan of a drawing or painting is perfectly fine for this purpose. It would be easier to tweak and clean that up in Photoshop for output, than a photo in "neutral, ambient light' would be. And, with a scanner, it's guaranteed to be in focus, which is not as guaranteed with a DSLR - that's why art is usually shot on a copy camera - it's STABLE, and you can get a perfect focus on the artwork.

What kind of work did you actually do? Going by your comments, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Again, i worked at a fine art publisher where we did everything in house, except drum scanning transparencies. Oh, and by the way - for certain sizes, our scan house used a large format flat scanner.

Neutral ambient light. LOL. You're a complete fucktard. You're creating more work trying to color correct a shot like that for output, when he can just slap it on a scanner and get most of the way there in under a minute. LOL. Just shut the fuck up.

>>3115483
LOL.

>>3115483
well that's how we did it, i worked photographing japanese prints and ink wash paintings for archival purposes at the national gallery here. we used a rig similar to like an animation camera only with the camera further away obviously. with light which reflected up off a white reflector. (the same rig is used for all the digitizing, aside from stuff on display)

did i perhaps use the wrong term for neutral ambient light, like perhaps there's a more photography way of saying it, i mean bouncing a flash of something white, to be clear, diffuse instead of ambient maybe?

i don't see how a white background fixes say, a thin layer of red that comes out on the scanner pink, or orange because of the color of the paper?

i don't know much about hdr though that's why i said maybe, we did use bracketing sometimes though, which is where you take 2 or 3 pictures in different light intensities and combine them in photoshop, i thought hdr was more or less the same process.

perhaps your job didn't require color accuracy and you just used a scanner because it was easier or faster?

i've also scanned my own work at home and found the results to be irretrievably inaccurate, which isn't the case with a photo, but my camera cost a lot more than my scanner so idk

>>3116283
oops you already know what a copy camera is lol, sry.

they did also have a huge vertical one, i remember now, it wasn't being used at the time.

anyway i don't think it's much of an ask to take a photo in focus lol if you have a tripod and some lamps you could even make a copy camera if focus is such an issue.