How to Retouch Jewelry Photographs to Enhance their Beauty and Value?

Photographing jewelry is a creatively adventurous job. Working with very small products demands a painstaking and meticulous approach. Commercial photographers understand the importance of digital post processing in jewelry photography. Hours of tweaking in Photoshop allows you to highlight the details of the jewelry, enhance its appeal, and make it worthy for commercial purposes.

Here are a few tips that can help you enhance your jewelry photographs.

Adjust Color BalanceA professional photographer may prefer getting the white balance settings right in the camera than fixing it in post production. However, if you have ended up with a jewelry photograph with color casts, this simple step can help you get rid of it. In Photoshop, go to Image>Adjustments>Color Balance. The pop up window comes with multiple sliders and options that allow you to adjust the colors in the mid color range, the highlights and the shadows.

Tweak Brightness and ContrastThere are a couple of ways in which you can adjust the brightness and contrast of your photographs. You can either go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Brightness/Contrast or create an adjustment layer. Most professionals prefer the latter method as it allows making changes to the image without permanently altering it. Click the half white and black circle at the bottom of the layers palette to create brightness and contrast adjustment layer.

Use Unsharp MaskWhile many digital cameras come with sharpening features, photographers turn it down as low as it will go or turn it off to gain more control over the sharpness during photo post production. Unsharp Mask is a Photoshop tool that sets the professionals apart from the amateurs. In Photoshop, you will find this tool under Filter>Sharpen.

The Unsharp mask comes with 3 sliders – Amount, Radius, and Threshold. Sharpening the photograph makes the light pixels lighter and the dark pixels darker. The amount slider determines the value of light and dark pixels. By making changes to the Radius value, you can control the area that will be sharpened. Threshold determines the intensity of contrast between colors.

Grab the Pen ToolThis is where the tedious work begins. You would need cutouts/silhouettes/clipping paths of your jewelry photographs to display them in brochures, advertising materials and websites. Here is an amazingly simple clipping path tutorial that will help you learn how to isolate your jewelry from the photograph.

The highly polished metals, curved nature of the pieces, extensive details of the jewelry, and the presence of gemstones can make photo retouching a time consuming task. However, you must dedicate a few hours of your schedule for this as it adds sparkle and beauty to your jewelry images.

Check out Powerweave Studio’s Blog for more tips & techniques.