To provide a photographic sensitive material which reduces image unevenness due to scanning exposure and suppresses color smear in very thin line reproduction and blurring of the outlines of black characters and images, and to provide an image forming method.

Relating to the photographic sensitive material having yellow, magenta and cyan image forming layers, when color development is performed after scanning exposure with a light beam, densities satisfy relationships of the expressions (3): |Dl(Y)/Dl(M)-Ds(Y)/Ds(M)|≤0.5 and (4): |D1(C)/Dl(M)-Ds(C)/Ds(M)|≤0.5, wherein Dl represents reflection density obtained when scanning exposure is performed with an intraraster overlap of a light beam of 25% to expose a square image having an area of ((beam diameter)×1,000)2 with maximum light exposure and then color development is performed; and Ds represents reflection density obtained when scanning exposure is similarly performed to expose a square image having an area of ((beam diameter)×2)2 with maximum light exposure and then color development is performed.