Artwork pencil on white

I'm a Cinematographer, my wife is an artist. She draws mainly pencil on white cartridge paper (similar to velvet fine art paper, slight texture). I photograph her

work in very even, flat light, yet really struggle to get even whites when I print, in fact I often get grey gradients in corners. If I adjust the curves/levels in

Lightroom to get clinical whites, I loose detail in the light pencil areas. Photographing people on white limbos and grading the whites in telecine is easy

compared to trying to print on paper or even achieve a nice 'clean' digital file.

 

Any suggestions? Tips? Tricks?

 

Thanks in advance.

Hi, here's a couple of tests you might try. First, pull the camera farther back, so the artwork is in a smaller central part of

the frame. If the corner gradients go away, then you know they were likely due to a camera/lens vignetting issue.

 

The second test is for even lighting, which is surprisingly difficult to get perfect ("acceptably close" is fairly easy). But you

need to have some polarizing filters. Put one filter on the camera lens, and the other on a built-in or hot-shoe flash. You

need to match up the relative rotation of the filters, which you can do by looking into a mirror (through the camera

viewfinder), then rotate until the flashtube appears dark (do this under ambient light, not flash). If this doesn't even out the

paper tone, my best guess is that the paper itself contains the variation, in which case you could try photographing with a

couple blank sheets under it.

 

If no luck with these tests, I'd concede that it's necessary to fix digitally, which is what you first asked, and I'll defer to

some of the experts in this area.

<p>I think you need to use some selective adjustments for more control. I scan pencil drawings, works well.</p><div></div>

<p>Thanks<br>

Flash? I'm too used to my old tungsten habits. I usually shoot them exterior in either flat light or in a shadowed spot. I've used a dozen different lenses, Leica M, Nikon, even an old set of PL mounted Zeiss super speeds. Its a post fix/technique I'm seeking, especially as a lot of images are already catalogued so would be nice to go back to the original neg scans / files and rework them.<br>

As for the scanner suggestion, they are way too big for my V700, they are closer to A3 size and it seems a decent A3 scanner would be about £2k+<br>

I've tried layer masks (obviously) but my photoshop knowledge beyond that gets a bit sketchy, I normally use Lightroom for doing 'regular' photography corrections, but I'm struggling with these white BG's</p>

Ok, I get your point; you want to fix a lot of images that you already have.

 

If I were trying to handle this sort of problem on a large scale, I'd want to know the real source of the problem. When you

get grey gradients in the corners, it seems likely that it's vignetting in your camera system. If so, and your system is

predictable, the first thing I think of is that you might be able to photograph a blank target, then invert the image and use it

as a corrective mask. But if that's not the real issue, then it would be a waste of time trying to do it.

 

Anyway, even if you don't plan to reshoot, there can be some value to finding out the origin of the problem; it may

influence how you go about fixing the images.

<p>Jeff--do have an image you can post that shows grey gradients in the corners? One approach would be to apply an adjustment layer to the drawing using Levels and picking the white and black points and moving the sliders to eliminate the grey. You could also convert to greyscale; however, I notice that the 'eyes' in this drawing are blue, so that color would be lost (unless you use a black and white adjustment layer and mask out the eyes). Interestingly though, I took the drawing you have posted and pushed the mid-grey slider hard to the right and saw what looked to be either another drawing (possibly erased) on the right side of this drawing. In this case, you would need to be careful not to push this slider to far to the right or you'd be dealing with much more than grey corners.</p>

<p>Is your goal to have a true black and white image here, or do you want some variance in the penciled areas with some shades of grey coming through? (Insert obvious comment here about how many shades of grey...)</p>

<p>Thank you for the replies. I am away shooting for a while but will post example when I retrurn.... the image posted earlier was posted by somebody trying to help, not by me and does not represent the type of artwork I'm attempting to archive/ copy/ print. They are made up of an extensive range of greys from white to black, not just black line drawings on white BG</p>