There are many types of jewelry in the world, and for jewelry businesses, it is very important that their photos properly reflects that. Some jewellers will provide only one image of the jewelry and as retouchers, we must know how to change the colors according to the different types of gold. This method would help the client save money by only focusing on shooting one gold bracelet instead of four.
The four most common types of gold are: 24 Karat (K), 18K, 14K and white gold. And today, we’re going to show you how to retouch this bracelet in order to achieve each types of gold.
This is an example of a 24K gold color. If you can notice, this shade of gold is much richer, more saturated, shinier and more yellow than our original image.
To do this is photoshop, we first select the areas where we want to make our adjustments. In this case, we only want the gold or the “yellow” part of the image to be changed. After opening the file on Photoshop, we must duplicate the original layer to avoid making some changes to the original. After doing so, we can now use the adjustment layer called “Hue/Saturation”
On your layers panel, click on this icon and select “Hue/Saturation”
Photoshop will automatically create an adjustment layer.
Hue/Saturation is a tool used in Photoshop that allows you to edit the either the entire image’s color channels or individual color channels using sliders within Photoshop. This allows you to modify the hues, saturation and brightness of an image.
For this tutorial were, going to select the yellow channel.
By selecting the yellow channel, we are now free to tweak the bracelet colour without affecting the blue part of the jewelry. To achieve a 24K gold look, what we usually do is increase the saturation and bring up the brightness to make the image pop out a bit more.
We may follow this gold color swatch to help us guide with how each type of gold looks.
Please note that these adjustments are only for this specific image. Adjustments for different images may vary.
We can follow the same steps for creating an 18K gold bracelet. 18K gold is only 75% pure gold compared to 24K which is 99.9%, so naturally the gold is less saturated.
14K gold consists of 58.3% which makes the gold much less saturated than 18K gold. By repeating the same steps for both 24K and 18K, we can also turn our original jewelry color into 14K gold.
If we look back at our color swatch, we may notice that “White Gold” is not completely desaturated. There’s still a slight hint of “gold” into it. We can follow the same steps before to achieve that white gold color, but as we desaturate the yellow channel, the reds would still be intact.
Currently, the image does not good, but we can easily solve this by switching over the red channel and completely desaturating the reds.
From here, we adjust the yellows again to match the “white gold” color.
To help us compare our edited jewelry with the color swatch, we’ve placed the images together side by side.
By acquiring the services of professional retouchers, we can definitely transform your one bracelet image into different variations of gold.
