It is common knowledge that capturing scintillating jewelry pictures is a daunting task. Filigreed pieces often fail to be captured in full details whereas the reflection from gemstones renders them dull in images. Professional snap clarity also depends on strategic lighting and jewelry dimensions. If you fail to harness the potential of sophisticated camera techniques, your promising business prospects can be dampened by poor photography. This is where jewelry retouching becomes inevitable.
Retouching is imperative to attract the attention of online jewelry shoppers by highlighting to them the exquisiteness of your products. You should have prior knowledge of the entire array of jewellery retouching techniques to carry out the touching up activities like removal of backgrounds, fine-tuning light reflection, eliminating blemishes, adjusting contrast and dark spots, and image resizing. In fact, there are numerous techniques and best results can be obtained only when they are optimally blended.
Add warmth to your products through captivating images
Image retouching heightens the appeal of professional snaps. This is why jewelry photo editing options are in lofty demand. Shoppers can experience the brilliance of the jewelry from multiple facets through realistic photography in high dimension without actually touching the product. Research has demonstrated that emotional sentiments guide prospects to purchase particular products. Someone wants to lift the mood of his wife, while someone may be interested in seeing a broad smile break on the face of his mother. These emotional values have to find adequate reflection in the image to drive sales. Drearily pictured jewelry would only distract the buyer whereas sharp, shining and spectacular images worked upon by any of the best companies offering jewelry photo retouching services would diffuse warmth that would make one feel emotional.
Download the jewellery retouching in photoshop tutorials in pdf version.
Retouching a Ring Image – Simple 4 Steps Process
Background mapping
White background of images is popular in the online jewelry market as distractions are eliminated to facilitate the prospect’s to concentrate on the innate beauty of the product. The metallic part and gem should be clipped on different layers to achieve a continuum of the white, blemish-free backdrop. Due to the individual editing needs of the singular elements constituting the jewelry, independent layers and paths should be provided. Settings you intend applying to the metallic layer would not work for the gem layer. This effort makes the jewelry command a distinctive look for itself, with each detail visible to the naked eye. Photoshop’s ‘Pen’ tool with a feather radius set at 1.5 pixels would help in clipping seamlessly. This is a technique that most of the professionals excelling in product photo retouching services follow.
In order to cover all curves during clipping, zoom to 300%. Using the Alt or Opt keys, you can develop sharp edges or steer a clipping curve on a different path. Using the ‘Paths’ option from the ‘Windows’ menu, you need to create a fresh path for every element. In the Paths window, you can select the path swiftly by clicking on the thumbnail.
You can boost sales by 67% with a white backdrop; studies indicate so.
Retouching metallic parts
This exercise involves 3 aspects.
Step 1:
Dust removal involves clearing smudges that your eyes may not pick up unassisted. Upon enlarging the image, fingerprints and other soiled parts become evident and need to be eliminated. When doing jewelry photo editing in Photoshop, the ‘Spot Healing Brush Tool’ is the right choice to make; it scans areas external to brushwork, dissects the shapes, and then implements color with value retouching successfully depending on the ambience of the objects. The tool perfectly removes speckles on large surfaces but is not effective for dust sticking to edges. The ‘Patch’ tool helps in substituting the outlined surface with other source images in good condition. Healing brush is capable of spontaneously matching value and color, and as such, one has to indicate the selected texture only. Dirt on edges is effectively removed, and the base gradient/ color are preserved impeccably. This supports a smooth transition to the source image.
Step 2:
Second stage with the jewelry photo editing software, Photoshop involves setting right the distortions brought about by reflection of ambience light. Colorful gems have tendency to reflect light with their facets, thus causing undesirable blur. The reflection can occur due to lens of camera, light sources, or dummy object adorned with jewelry and badly affect the rear shank, metallic part and primary gem. To counteract this, you need to click pictures in good ambient light setting. The outsourced image editors have extensive libraries of idealistic reflections which are used for substituting reflections that are hard to mend. With ‘Brush’ tool, you can eliminate the shabby reflection. Blackish reflections can also be removed with healing brushes.
Step 3:
The third aspect relates to correcting the color. Your final image’s quality would be turbocharged through critical color improvement. Often, you may have run into trouble when the 18 carat gold jewelry seems like silver or platinum built and thus convey an incorrect impression to the onlookers. In Photoshop, a number of ways are present to ameliorate the metallic sheen and color. In order to ensure consistency of metallic hues and warmth of color tones, one needs to toil meticulously using the tools available for jewelry image editing. A number of Photoshop customized plugins as well as Lightroom can carry out this job with success.
Retouching gems and precious stones
Gem photography, particularly diamonds, tests the skills and nous of the artist. The imperfections that may surface up would be contingent on the stones’ cut and type. Without professional retouching intervention, such flaws cannot be corrected. Glare would be apparent on gem’s face if white light in abundance is directed on flat surface or facets have been exposed wrongly to light. Retouching helps in manifesting the real depth of precious stones along with inherent color and clarity.
You can regulate gem’s brightness and make true color appear with ‘Brightness and Contrast’ tools. The gem’s shadow can be highlighted with ‘Levels’ tool. Selecting and retaining the desired colors are affected with ‘Hue and saturation’ tool. You can make all facets of gems stand out with ‘Unsharp Mask’ tool. The side stones can be sharpened adequately with ‘Smart Sharpen’ tool.
Creating natural shadowing effect
You can make your jewelry more realistic with natural feel by working on shadows. This is one of those jewelry photography editing tips that many overlook. Your jewelry product would have a character of its own through addition of depth that makes it more alluring to buyers. Zero distraction would contribute in convincing the buyer of the gem’s true worth. By removing noise, you create a visual spectacular around the jewelry that would step up demand significantly even though the market is saturated with similar products.
If you are into online business, there are many things that you have to manage. Besides image retouching and improved require specific skills that only a professional possesses. This is why it is always recommended to outsource photo editing services. India has been one of the more preferred destinations for ecommerce businesses worldwide, let it be back office support or image enhancement.