Jewelry Retouching Guide
The Jewelry Retoucher aims to make jewelry look good through the process of retouching images of jewelry. From removing dust on a ring to making a necklace shine, the team makes sure your jewelry shines out the way it’s supposed to using light and color correction tools. Our guide on retouching jewelry will show you how to edit jewelry photos to make your pieces pop out in images.
1
Shooting The Jewelry
Before learning how to edit jewelry photos, we have to take a photo of the jewelry we want to retouch. Take note of a few things before shooting the jewelry. Earrings would shine differently depending on the environment. You can be outside and your earrings would shine one way and your other pieces such as your necklace could shine in another way. Bracelets would sparkle differently if it was under daylight compared to studio lights.
Whether it’s a necklace, bracelet, or ring, the jewelry you see online usually has an object keeping it in an upright position so that the object looks like it’s floating. The trick to cleaning up the background during jewelry editing is to remove objects so that it would look like they are standing upright without any support holding them up.
2
Working with Lighting
Apart from learning how to edit jewelry photos, you need to learn how to properly prep and shoot them.
One of the biggest challenges to shooting jewelry is the lighting used on the object. Sometimes the lighting may be too bright and other times, the lighting may be too dark. The different levels of lighting may cause unwanted details to pop up and give you a less-than-ideal image of the jewelry. Bad lighting could also cause the stone’s glimmer to be dulled down or even reduce the luster of aluminum, gold, and, silver.
Jewelry can also gather a lot of dust even when brand new. The camera simply captures all the details you may not be satisfied with. Diamonds shine differently based on the environment. Under daylight, diamonds may display a rainbow-like pattern while they could turn into a bluish color under UV light.
Making sure you have all the right conditions makes editing jewelry photos easier.
3
Retouching The Image and Cleaning The Background
Like any proper cleanup, we have to remove the remaining impurities of the jewelry such as fingerprints, scratches, and dust. When we take a picture of the jewelry, the camera will capture everything. From scratches to dust, the camera will capture the fine print of jewelry. The dirt will be visible, so you have to clean it up as much as possible prior to shooting. When the jewelry is cleaned up, you’re giving yourself an easier time retouching jewelry images for the customer.
After cleaning up the image, the jewelry should look as clean as possible and the customer will see a major improvement over the image that was shot.
We also have to remove anything in the background. You want to remove anything that is blocking the image such as price tags or the platform keeping the jewelry in place.
The Jewelry Retouching Team starts with creating a clipping path to separate the jewelry from the background. What we are trying to do is remove the object from the original background and place it on a plain white background that is free from obstructions. Using the pen tool, we are able to create paths that can place the jewelry on a plain white background without making it look as if it was forcibly removed from the image.
4
Creating Shadows for Jewelry
After clipping, we can place the jewelry on a white background and make it look like it was floating. However, we don’t want to make the image look like it’s above the air. The solution to the floating jewelry is simply adding shadows under the item. Creating shadows requires a good amount of experience with software such as Photoshop and Lightroom. We can draw the shadow manually but, we need to know where the light is coming from and draw the shadow on the opposite side.
Having a shadow makes the jewelry look like it is grounded and natural. After all, everything has a shadow. Editing the jewelry would ensure that the image still looks a certain way:
5
Color Correction
The next part of learning how to edit jewelry photos is making sure the colors look the way they want to after shooting. You want to make the color pop out. After shooting, most images of jewelry would look a little dull at first. Avoiding a dull tone is important to retouching jewelry.
6
Repainting the Shine
Sometimes, the shine of jewelry could be less visible after a photoshoot. Many different factors can cause the jewelry to lose its shine such as faulty lighting. The metal part holding the jewelry together could also show reflections of the photographer, the background, or anything nearby. The silver pieces used to hold the jewelry together such as the ring or cuff can look different in the environment they are in. Instead of having something look shiny, you end up with a mirror.
7
Jewelry Editing Musts
An important skill one needs to master when learning how to edit jewelry photos is knowing how to make metals shine in photos.
One way to bring back the metal’s shine is by repainting the shine again into the metal. When we repaint the shine, we can remove the unnecessary parts such as the dull colors of the jewelry. You can make the jewelry shine by creating a clipping path using the pen tool.
8
Enhancing Jewelry Through Editing
There are some details of jewelry that are only visible to the human eye. Showing images of jewelry online requires a lot of enhancements. Cleaning the dust is one of the many things that Photoshop can do to edit jewelry photos. We can adjust settings such as Curves, Hues, Levels, and Selective Colors.
The important action in enhancing the photos is to push these settings to the limit. We can achieve the most ideal version of the image without ruining it.
The cuts of diamonds aren’t always visible on-camera so we need to enhance the jewelry by choosing sections to brighten or gently paint over the area. Jewelry has so many shapes that you have to carefully look through to make it sparkle as it would to the human eye.
Speaking of the human eye, look at real jewelry and, you’ll notice several colors popping up. Jewelry can reflect different colors depending on the type of jewelry you have. Due to the various colors that pop out in jewelry, the team needs to manually color the different parts to show the different colors you will find.
There you have it. Jewelry Retoucher’s guide on how to edit jewelry photos. Now you know a bit more about how to bring out the shine that may be covered up by regular photos. Compare the original photo to the edited photo and you will notice major differences between a raw photo in an environment with uncontrollable factors and a jewelry photo that was edited with the help of editing and retouching tools.
You won’t see the holders keeping the jewelry upright. The jewelry will shine the way it’s supposed to like it does with the human eye all on a screen.
Looking at jewelry with the human eye and seeing the object in person is one thing but, the viewer’s perspective changes when they only see an image of the jewelry and not the jewelry itself. Impurities such as dust marks and fingerprints would be visible.
The drastic change between seeing jewelry in person compared to seeing the image online shows how important jewelry retouching is to appeal to the customer.
For more information on our jewelry photo retouching services, you can contact the Jewelry Retoucher.
