How I Create Decent Digital Copies of My Graphic Recordings

How I created a high-quality digital copy of my graphic recording

There may be easier ways to do this (like the iPhone scan that Sarah suggested I try), so I'll try that with my iPad next time.
But this is what worked for me with this project.

I. Take pictures in natural light: I avoided direct sunlight but I felt like the colors I used in my graphic recording looked best in the photographs I took by by the hotel window.
I took pictures section-by-section (actually page by page, in my case) as Sarah had advised me to do.
I tried putting the sheets on the floor, standing on top of a chair and photographing the whole panel in one go but it didn't work out for me. If I manage to get my paws on a selfie stick next time, I will try taking better pictures of the full panel with that.

II. Select my favorite photographs: when doing this, I cropped out any folded sections in the corners of the charts, I made sure that all of the texts were visible, and that the light fell evenly on the sheet.
There were some good photographs that I had to disqualify because I had accidentally cropped out a small section of the paper that had text or a drawing on it.

The photographs that were taken with my camera came out mostly over-exposed or with other 'defects' that I wasn't willing to bother with fixing. So, I just used the photos I took with my phone (a trusty Samsung Galaxy Note 10). I transferred the photos I chose to a folder in my phone, and moved that to USB-C USB flash to avoid losing any quality.

III. Editing the photographs:
Once I had the photographs on my computer, I moved each one to Adobe Photoshop and fiddled with two features:
1. Levels: I move the arrow to the right to darken the black marker strokes and make the page look whiter (but not so bright I wash out the light colors on the page).
2. Curves: this is where I get to adjust the light and dark colors on the page to make it look at close to the original as possible (or perhaps even better).
3. Saturation: I didn't find it important to do this for all of the pages, though.

Next, I removed the 'white' part of the page in three steps:
1. Select the 'Background layer' in the layers panel and click the magic wand tool
2. Set the 'tolerance' to around 10
3. Select a darker section on the page
4. Go to the Edit panel and click 'select similar'
5. Once all of the white sections are selected, click delete. If this deleted a 'grey' section or parts you didn't want deleted, 'undo', lower the magic wand tolerance and select 'delete' again.

Finally, I exported all of the Photoshop files as .png files and import them on Adobe Illustrator. There, I create one label with the individual photographs of paper.
For my last project, I also added a large header which I think tied the whole panel together better. I know we could do this on Adobe Photoshop too, but I try to spend as little time in that software as possible :D

That's it. I exported the final panel as a .jpg file with a proper title and emailed it to my clients.