Your mobile phone has an excellent camera but photos of the whiteboard aren’t coming out as good and clear as you would like them to be. Maybe there’s poor lighting in the conference room? Maybe your camera’s settings aren’t perfect for capturing whiteboard photos?

One little trick that will vastly improve the quality of your whiteboard pictures is available inside the manual settings of your cameraphone. Go to your camera’s manual settings, choose EV (Exposure Value) and add 1 or 2 “stops” (usually indicated by +2) before clicking the Capture button.

Then there’s a shell script that brightens and cleans up your whiteboard images using the popular ImageMagick library. It runs from the command line and all it needs is ImageMagick, a free image editing software that is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

If you find it a hassle to remember commands, there’s an even easier way. Capture the whiteboard scribbles with your mobile camera and send the picture as an email attachment to the following email address.

please@make.unwhiteboard.com

Wait for a minute or two and you’ll get a prettier version of the whiteboard image, clean and legible and more optimized for printing. Here’s an example.

Before

After

Internally, the Unwhiteboard service uses the same ImageMagick command to clean up your Whiteboard captures but on their own server so you don’t have to install anything on your computer.

Here are some more useful email addresses.