Hi Jascha,
I’ve been involved in small product photography for many years, and
have had many clients who prefer gradient backgrounds of one sort or
another.
I don’t know what you are using for your post-processing software,
but all of them offer some way to digitally create a gradient
background. The response I usually get when I mention that concerns
the supposed difficulty of masking out the background in the
original image so that it can be cleanly placed on the gradient (or
some other) background. Masking presents problems for many people.
I used to struggle with this, until I learned how to photograph
jewelry (or any other object) in such a way that there were no
shadows cast on the background, and the background was a different
color or tonality from the object being photographed. One simply
shoots on a piece of glass elevated above a background which is
brightly and separately lit. The resulting lack of shadows and
highly contrasting background makes masking a couple of easy mouse
clicks in either Photoshop or Elements Ver 7.0.
To address the gradient itself (if you don’t care for digitally
generated backgrounds), I set up a piece of colored paper which has
no gradient, but I create the gradient with a soft light, which
diminishes a it travels up or down the curved piece of paper. I
photograph the paper by itself and save that image to be pasted in a
new file, over which I paste the masked image. It’s impossible to
tell it was not shot on a gradient background, I can change the
color at will with the Hue/Saturation tools, and it never scratches!
So, with one image, I have an infinite variety of colored
backgrounds available to me at almost no cost.
Wayne Emery
Riverbend Imaging
Davenport IA
"Bending Light Since 1975"