Prepare a photo of a b/w drawing before submission

Edit 1 July 2016:
Please note that I have recently updated much of what is in this tutorial, and added some new material, in a series of tutorials using GIMP 2.8.14:
                            Minimising Graphite Shine                           
                            Barrel Distortion Correction       
                            Perspective Distortion Correction                 
                            Histogram Adjustment

 

This is a tutorial showing how I photograph my graphite pencil drawings and then edit the photographs prior to submission to dA.  I use Windows Photo Gallery and Zoner Photo Studio in this tutorial, but other software will offer similar facilities.

I have decided to upload this tutorial because I have seen drawings submitted, often by new members, which clearly do not do full justice to the drawings and I hope that this tutorial will help them to display their art to the best advantage.  My early drawing submissions were not edited in this way and the photos always looked less good than the drawing, being grey, washed-out and lacking some of the dynamic impact of the original.  I have recently revisited a few of my more popular early submissions and re-edited them using the Zoner software so that they more closely match my original drawing.

I am no expert in photo-editing, having no experience outside that given in this tutorial, but only very basic editing is needed, or should be applied, to prepare a photo of a graphite drawing for submission. Indeed more advanced techniques would fall into the category of photo-manipulation and the submitted photo would not be a true representation of the drawing.

Added 22 October 2014
Further edit adding 1a 16 October 2015

Since I wrote the above tutorial I have found out that this was not achieving the best results possible, and I have now made a few changes, although the principles of adjusting the histogram are the same.
1.  I now take more care over getting even illumination.  I use a piece of black paper and look at it through the camera.  This seems to be more sensitive than using white paper.  Previously, reflection of sunlight from the carpet had sometimes been a problem, which had gone unnoticed.  I now balance light from right and left (windows at both ends of the room) by adjusting blinds and curtains and may augment with artificial light also.
1a To reduce the effect of graphite shine I now photograph using a 2 second delay on the camera, which gives me time to hold a dark sheet (actually I use my navy blue cardigan!) immediately behind the camera to block out any light from behind the camera that might reflect from the graphite shine into the camera lens.
2.  I have found that using the zoom on my camera to increase the distance of the camera from the drawing (which makes alignment easier) had adversely affected definition, so I now photograph without zoom, from a close distance. 
3.  This, however, introduces a small amount of barrel distortion!  So I now use GIMP (a free program) to correct for this.  I then trim to A4 ratio (using the fixed ratio crop feature) just outside the drawing paper area and correct for any small amount of perspective distortion that may exist because the paper was not perfectly aligned with the camera axis, by dragging the image of the A4 paper to the corners of the crop, again in GIMP.
4.  I then crop to the drawn picture area and rotate the picture if necessary.
5.  Then I adjust the histogram in the same way as in my tutorial, but using GIMP which allows a logarithmic histogram to be displayed, which makes the black and white limits of the  histogram very clear.
6.  Finally I adjust the tone curve, in GIMP, if necessary.

GIMP is very much more versatile than the free version of Zoner that I used previously.  Changes can be displayed as you make adjustments, rather than just in a thumbnail as in Zoner.