The Color of Paper

[newmango]

I'm new, but I promise to come back often if someone can help me with this.

I have to retouch a lot of photographs of artwork - you know, paint on paper of canvas, with the goal of getting clean digital images. Too often, the photos are taken by people who don't/can't use the white balance settings on their camera, or are poorly lit, lit by a flash, etc. This means that one part of the image is correctly exposed and the white paper appears white, while in another part the paper is gray or blue, and has the same values as actual image pixels in the other part. My job is to get all the paper to appear uniformly white without destroying or altering any pixels in the painted image.

What I've been doing selecting the correctly exposed, white background areas with a soft-edge lasso, inverting the selection, and using Curves to lighten the light end in very small increments. Make a new selection to lock out the areas I just adjusted and repeat.

This is all pretty tedious and time-consuming, and I'm wondering if there might be a better method. Any ideas?

[igot2pman]

Check out this thread Anyone Have A Quick Fix To Remove Seams/Shadows?

Blend if may also help here. But sides retaking the pictures i do not think there will be a quick fix.

Taking pictures of non-moving objects should be a sinch. Pity some can get paid to do crap work.

Hope it helps,
-Keven