Tips, tricks and the reason why the edit is needed in the first place.
High end luxury diamond jewelry is normally encased in precious metals like gold, silver, rose gold, platinum and white gold. Suppliers of luxury jewelry might only custom make the piece you want once you’ve given exact specifications on things like:
- The kind of diamond or precious stone you want including the size such ranging from about 0.5 – 6 karats
- The kind of cut your main stone will have (emerald cut, princess cut, etc)
- The kind of embellishment you want around the stone
- And finally, the point of this article folks, the choice of metal
Why Do You Need to Edit Metal for your Online shop?
Now, before we dive in to how we can make online jewelry shops show off their vast variety of cuts and metal colors let’s take a moment to see WHY this would need to be retouched in the first place.
If you’re an experienced online jewelry shop owner you’ll know the answer right away, and for first timers…the answer is simple: cost. Saving a lot of dough. Keeping the dollars in the safe. Sitting on your hard earned cash. You get the point. Saving money.
As a business owner if you had to show a true example of every single diamond cut mixed in with every single kind of metal possible, you’d likely be increasing your inventory by about 3-5 times, and at the risk of some mixes not selling, that becomes quite an expensive inventory.
Online shops are a lot more sophisticated now, and they create one true design of each piece, normally in white gold since it has the most neutral tone and hue.
Then, sound the trumpets, because we step into the picture and make that one sample into many variations. We help create other realistic looks of how the jewelry would look in various metals. This saves a lot of manufacturing time, and ,more importantly, saves a lot of money.
Retouching White Gold into Yellow Gold and Rose Gold
In our other article about metals and colors, we explain the difference in hue and luster between the precious metals. But, our most common requests for only changing a piece from White Gold to Yellow Gold and Rose Gold will be explained.
Here’s the base white gold picture. It has already undergone a round of dust and scratch cleanup, brightness and enhancement to make it look as close as possible to how you might see it in real life.
We have to do a careful isolation of the diamonds from the metal, using the pen tool to create a very accurate clipping path or cutout. We’ll show it against a pure black background so it’s easier to understand the actual shape of our cutout.
This can be fairly tricky since the prongs or clasps holding the diamond are so shiny that it reflects the stone almost like a mirror.
Through experience we know how to decipher between the metal and diamond areas. The cutout should look something like this:
Then we apply a mix of color and blend modes to get the correct kind of gold and rose gold option for that piece. Each client will have a different preference on how deep the colors are, and how shiny or matte the metal should be.
You can see here on Photoshop we have a bunch of different color combinations and effects to create the Yellow Gold and Rose Gold consistency.
When we edit lots of pieces for inline jewelry shops, we always save the layered file so that the color application on all pieces will be completely consistent.
Here are some other examples we have made using the same mix.
If you need assistance with photo retouching of your luxury jewelry, send us a message, well be happy to give you a free demo.
Email us at [email protected] to find out more.
