Advise On Getting Good Photo Of Painting With White Background !

If you have camera raw filter in photoshop you can reset the highlights and whites until the structure of your painting shows in the white background.

Lutz, is there a free or low cost Photoshop available with these settings? I have Gimp and a zillion others, but so many buttons I never understand how to use. I'll search for "camera raw filter", thank you.

Try PICASA free download In GIMP is there a setting for correcting color cast? If you point to what should be white all the colors will balance out.

Carlin, photoshop elements is a low cost program. There it is not a filter, instead you open your file as "camera raw" instead of just "open file". I find it manage to recover tones in the white even in jpeg files.

Thank you Jessica,
I tried Picasa in the past and found it had too many bells and whistles, that is why I like the simplistic nature of Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
I will look for a "correcting color cast" setting in Gimp or Picassa, I might be able to use that portion of it :-)

Thanks Lutz,
I'm reading up on Camera RAW....again. So much to learn, you and Jessica have been very helpful to point me in the right direction.

Carlin,

If the issue is just that the "whites" aren't white enough, but are still true whites, then that's just an exposure problem. Find one of your software programs and then find something called "brightness" or "exposure" and then bump it up, until the whites are clean.

Generally, shooting outdoors, the shadow will create a blue-ish or cyan-ish caste too, so if you see that, either add a bit of yellow, or if cyan, add a bit of red, which has yellow in it and THEN increase the brightness or exposure.

If you're just using your phone, don't worry about RAW files, you're phone won't produce them.

Hope this helps!

You can send me any files that you have and I'll fix them, if the image has a real white in them,

email me privately and I'll give you my address,

Rich

Carlin, in Gimp go to the heading and click "Colors" then click "Auto" then click "White balance." Click on the area that should be white. It will auto balance the white and the rest of the image automatically.

You all are so helpful, thank you. I still need to perfect my photographic skills. The trouble with my white background is that it isn't evenly "white", so when I "white balance" or "brighten" etc, the software does what it is supposed to do, but the white background is still a mess for print quality. I wish I could upload photos to show you what I am talking about. Rich, I will take you up on your very generous offer if you could better guide me in what I need to do to fix my white backgrounds.
Thanks everyone. I'm sure your input has helped others who are having this same issue.

Don't feel like you're alone Carlin, I don't always set the camera correctly for the type of lighting. I can usually solve the color problem with the curves and sometimes the channels on the curves. The curves are not difficult it's a matter of setting three points on the dark lines on the curve. The lower one is for adding or taking away color, the middle for mid range lighting and the top for highlights. Moving the points up and down will quickly show you what is happening in your image. The channels (above the curves at the top of the curve graph) are color coded and work by moving the points up and down for adding and taking away the colors in an image (blue, green and red). The curves will save you a lot of time rather than hunting around and trying to figure out what preset button or slider to push. The curves will also brighten, darken and increase or desaturate any file, paintings, illustrations, and photography.

Try using the Levels function in whatever software you're using and slide the right end (white) in a bit. It will make your whites whiter, that may be all you need.

And now I have a Whiter Shade of Pale earworm. ARGH.

Suzanne, I've seen those curves and channels and whatever and didn't know what to do with them. And I remember the time when it was said that computers were going to make our lives easier and provide us with more free time :-/

Susan...earworm, oh, is that what you call those annoying things! (thanks google) (see, the computer did free up my time)

With computers it's like with all other machines: if You want to use them You have to learn how they work. They do not know themselves what You want. GIMP is the best software You can get for free. It has the quality of the 70 $ photoshop elements.
Even with Your scanner: if You do not want to learn what impact the settings have than You can not expect the best result.
Finally: a smart phone is not really a good source for fine art.

What is Your problem with uploading ?

What do You want to see as background ? Plain white or some structure in the white ? That' a very big difference in the work flow.

Like Rich said: You can send me one sample too.

Carlin,

Just sent you a reply.

As far as the "levels" thing, if you can find that and then open it, you'll see a box and in the box, a "mountain", probably over towards the right and by taking the slider thingie, on the bottom of the right side of the box, over to the base of the mountain, you'll see the image get whiter. The middle might want to get moved a bit too. Just play with them, you can always just hit cancel and get back to where you started!

Rich

Thanks for everyone's input. I'm going to close this discussion now and "hit the books" on this subject.