Software that can help reduce yellow color from camera pictures of a book?

Question

This is what I mean by yellow color:

The lamp bulb I look doesn't look very yellow. Let's assume that I cannot change the lamp color. The lamp must be the origin of the yellowness though.

I use a windows 10 laptop

I use a galaxy s6 to take the pictures

I have a bunch of pictures from a book on my computer that are yellow tinted

What are the best free software to make the yellowness turn white for a group of many (say 100) images? And still after the image editing have crisp/clear pictures on book pages with mainly text and some math/diagrams?

Answer 1

I would suggest using Image Magick to correct the colour balance - once you have decided the level of changes that you need it will whip through your images converting them all to another name or directory and applying your colour correction to all of them. Personally I would start off with Gimp and a typical image to determine by eye how much RGB correction to apply.

Lots of good hints in the on-line colour mods section of the Image Magick site but, assuming that your originals do not need colour, I would suggest:

Using Image Magick: convert input_wildcard -colorspace gray out%d.png, Running this on the sample that you posted results in:

Both Gimp & Image Magick are free, open source, cross platform, accept a multitude of image formats and are very powerful - once you start using them you probably will not stop.

Answer 2

The parameter you want to edit is called white balance. You can change the settings in your smartphone camera to adjust it to incadescent light.

In order to correct it afterwards you can change this parameter in IrfanView (color correction) and use batch to apply this change to all files.

It is quite basic function. Try also to use Picasa.

Best Regards

Chris

Answer 3

I use Picasa, when need to correct colors balance. It is free and lightweight software. Of course, it doesn't have such features as Photoshop does, but it could be rather useful too.

Also Microsoty Office Picture Management allows editing contrast and brightness.

Answer 4

You could use RawTherapee. It is free and open source.

It is designed for processing RAW files, but most of the features also work fine for JPEG photos. This includes adjusting the white balance, ie the colour temperature and tint, plus the brightness and contrast. You can also convert to greyscale if you want.

Once you have figured out the correct settings for one photo, you can copy that processing profile, and apply it to all of your other photos. So they will all be adjusted in the same way.