Most of the photos straight from my digital camera are lacking one thing to make them stand out - contrast. Just a subtle difference in contrast or exposure can make a world of difference.

Before - not anything special. The colour temperature of the afternoon light caused a blue tinge to the white background.

I opened the image in Adobe Photoshop CS2 and selected Image>Adustments>Curves

Which then brings up the curves dialog box. I moved the dot from the middle

After

Next I open up the Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation dialog box and increase the lightness of the image filtered by cyan. This increases the lightness of the cyan pixels so that the background becomes white.

Final result

Next - using a Photoshop Action to speed up things