If you’re an artist, then you’ve probably had an experience like this – you make a really cool-looking drawing or painting, and then you either scan or digitally photograph it, only to find that the digital copy doesn’t look quite as good as the physical copy does.

It’s a strange experience, so I thought that I’d try to think about some of the possible reasons why this can happen. Here is what I came up with after a few minutes of general thought:

1) Too much or too little digital editing: Often, when an image is scanned, it can look slightly “faded”. This can be corrected by opening the image using an editing program (if you don’t have one, there’s a freeware open-source program called “GIMP” [GNU Image Manipulation Program] that can be useful) and adjusting the brightness/contrast levels in the image until it looks less…