We often get requests for photo editing jewelry pictures, and as the online world for shopping grows, so does the demand for perfectly polished images. It’s natural, people want to see what they’re about to buy. So the image must be absolutely clear and true to what they would get in real life.
E-commerce is very competitive, especially in today’s time where the internet and social media is free. Businesses can literally set up online shops without having to invest thousands and thousands of dollars. Everything is free flowing: businesses sell products, consumer consumes products and it all could be done in the comfort of your home.
If you’re an online Jewelry shop owner, you’ll know that it’s incredibly important to have the photos looking clear, sharp and bright. Here are some tips on how to make your images stand out online.
One way to sell your products more effectively is to present it more beautifully. Jewelry is oftentimes the most cherished accessory we could wear. Whenever we see jewelry, we see it glowing, shining, bold, charming, delicate, glittery and all of the other fancy adjectives you can think of. But, once it’s been shot by camera, the mystic of the image is lost. However, by image retouching we can bring back that magic that we see with the naked eye.
Today, we’re going to show you how to present your jewelry products more effectively by making them more aesthetically pleasing.
Shooting
Of course, we need to shoot the image first before retouching. We can’t retouch anything if there is no image.
Here are things that we must remember with shooting jewelry images:
- Jewelry piece has to be clean, meaning there should be as minimal dust, scratches and fingerprints as possible
- The background has to be clean as well
- Good lighting is of course an essential
- Shooting with a good camera is a must
After shooting, we came up with this shot. We’ve ticked all the boxes on how we should properly shoot jewelry, but the image clearly needs further improvement. This is where the retouching magic comes in.
Retouching
Our first step is to clean the ring, by removing remaining dust, scratches, fingerprints and getting rid of the holder.
As you can see, the improvement is drastic. Even without zooming in, you can see that the ring much cleaner that the original shot. I’ve repainted that entire section where the whole holder used to be in.
Next is we need to replace the background into plain white to that the image is only focused on the ring. What we usually do is my create clipping paths so the separation of the ring to the background is precise.
We used the pen tool to accurately create paths.
After creating the paths, we can now place the object on a plain white background.
After changing the background, the right now looks like it is floating. To fix this, we would need to add a shadow underneath. We have no reference for this since the original image did not have a proper shadow. What I did was to manually draw the shadow.
To do this, we must analyse where the light is coming from and draw the shadow opposite of that. In this case, the light is coming from above so the shadow needs to be directly under the ring.
The next problem we should address on the jewelry is its color and how it “pops.” Right now it is looking too dark and too dull to be considered high end.
First we must process the entire ring to balance out the colors and even out the tones.
As you can see here, the color balance has been adjusted so there’s no more of that yellowish-magenta cast that we had earlier. The tones have also been tweaked to improve the overall brightness and contrast.
We are now getting there. The image is at a 70%. To push the ring to look like a 100% retouched high end jewelry, we still have to make some adjustments.
First we need to make the diamonds much shinier because, naturally, diamonds are shiny. To separate the diamonds from the rest of the ring, we would also need to create clipping paths using the pen tool like how we did with the entire ring.
After doing so, we can mask out the areas we don’t need and make the adjustments for the diamonds.
We used a combination of “levels” and “curves” adjustment layers to achievement this look. Finally, we’re starting to see the diamonds pop out and it’s beginning to look like how we see diamonds with our naked eye.
Next is we need to the ring’s body look like actual steel. It needs to be shining, smooth and bright.
Again, our first step is to create paths to mask out unnecessary parts of the ring.
Now we’ve got the paths, we can not adjust the levels and curves of the body.
After applying layers and layers of levels and curves, we were finally able to create a high end look for the ring.
To compare the edit to the original:
We’ve successfully transformed the raw shot from the camera to how we interpret jewelry in real life. By hiring professional retouchers, you can definitely have images in your website that stand out among your competition.
Here are some other examples of stand out pieces we’ve done for other clients:
