Underexposure in photographing drawings & artwork!!

Photographing Artwork

using Canon EOS 400, Photoshop & iMacI can’t photograph drawings using my Canon EOS 400, photoshop & Imac. The jpegs are always chronically underexposed.

I suspect that it’s the camera is underexposing. But I’m happy with the exposures when taking snaps of non-artwork out in the real world. Which leads me to suspect that the cameras algorithms are reading the actual painting as if it were the real world (not an illusion) and adapting the exposures accordingly. Result : every one of about two thousand jpegs I’ve taken are badly exposed. Even when I custom set the white balance in the camera.

Here are two jpgs, optimised for web, of a drawing made on A4 paper, of a ‘high white’ stationery kind of paper with artificial whiteners in the paper so it’s a ‘high’ white & not a cream. The light is bright morning sunlight. The camera setting is WB of 5200 K, neutral colour space. Here is the result just optimised at 500 pixels image-size & sharpened for the web.

And here is the same image after I’ve adjust the levels & corrected the blue colour cast via colour balance.

Is my iMac screen badly calibrated? It’s a 2001 generation.. the last of the cathode screens. I suspect it’s burnt out.

Here’s the settings for the iMac screen calibration…not the same as most PCs!

Here’s the colour settings for photoshop. Set to the’ web graphics defaults’ in sRGB IEC61966-2,1. Is this photoshop colour setting badly calibrated? Should i set photoshop to my screen , or to the average PC screen out on the web or should I find out the colour space of the canon camera & set it to that?

How does one get an web image calibrated for PC screens given the white point & grey gammas are much higher in an Imac? How do I calibrate my screen to the canon EOS 400?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!