Simple Photo correction and workflow question

[jstnhllmn]

Hello folks,

 

I've collected a number of images from flickr that resemble the two attached here. I have two (simple?) questions:

1. What is the best way to remove the shadiness from the images so the drawn dark areas have common 'darkness' and the backgrounds (the page, essentially) are clean and simply white?

 

Actually, one question only. I'm not sure if the easiest way to do this is: lasso, mess with curves, or mess with blend ranges, etc. I find knowing and choosing the 'right' way to do simple functions like this to be terribly challenging.  

 

So many choices.

[John Rostron]

It is not all that clear whether you want to

• Just convert the background page colour to white (leaving the body untouched), or
• Convert the body shading to white, just leaving the skeleton.

For the former, you could start by adjusting the white point in curves or levels. Otherwise,  I would use the flood fill (magic wand) with a fairly low tolerance. After each selection, delete what is selected (assuming tha-t it is OK). You would still need to remove the shadows. This kind of greyscale image is often more difficult to clean up than it looks! Finally, add a white background fill below.

John

 

[R C-R]

For converting the page color to white, using the Flood Fill (paint bucket) Tool with a 4% tolerance setting & clicking just once on a light gray part of the background (around where the red X is) did a surprisingly good job of leaving the body almost untouched (a tiny bit of the tail was included):

After doing that, it was easy to use a white paint brush to paint out the grays around the edges & below the head.

 

I could not find an easy way to get rid of everything else, leaving just the skeleton. The best I could do was this skeleton.afphoto file, in which I added a live Levels & a live Curves adjustment & doing the adjustments in LAB lightness mode. It isn't very good but maybe it will give you an idea or two you might find useful.

[jstnhllmn]

Thanks for getting back to me, folks. I'm diving back in now — the non-destructive approach (live adjustments) will be experiment number 1.

Crossing me fingers.