Photographing Jewelry 101

I just learned the high pass trick from my husband. Very cool!

After you make the duplicate layer, select that layer. You’ll be
working on that one; by the time you’re finished it will just add to
the background layer rather than covering it.

Noel,

I tried to try this... I ran into trouble on step one

Janet got the order:

After you make the duplicate layer, select that layer. You'll be
working on that one; by the time you're finished it will just add
to the background layer rather than covering it". 

You work in layers. Select layers from Window, which will appear on
the right hand side of your screen. From the background image you
make a ‘background copy’. The way I do that is to drag the image into
‘create a new layer’ (you will find that selection next to “delete
layer” rubbish bin). You work on that layer. Follow the steps from my
earlier email. Try again and compare with your trick with the filter
‘sharpen/unsharpen’. Let me know your finding.

This ‘High Pass’ trick works very well. You will enjoy very sharp
images.

Peter Deckers
New Zealand

Wow, Peter!

Thanks so much for your “High Pass” tip!

I’ve been stumbling around with Photoshop for years, and this is
much better than the way I’ve been trying to get my images to pop.

Thanks for sharing. Orchid rocks!

Kate Wolf in Portland, Maine. Hosting wicked good workshops by the bay.
www.katewolfdesigns.com www.wolftools.com

I go with full manual, auto white balance, Fine quality and largest
size on the files, and I set the aperture and shutter speed based on
trial & error. I never use any auto setting (such as aperture
priority) for shooting jewelry, and I use a tripod when I can.

When I can’t use the tripod, I crank the aperture open to compensate
for having to speed up the shutter. There is no “set formula” that
I’ve found works on every piece. This is because we’re talking about
natural conditions, which vary, and jewelry, which doesn’t always
have the same size, colors or textures.

Lindsay Legler
Dreaming Dragon Designs

How do you keep the lens of the camera from showing up in the
jewelry? I’ve managed to block out the body of the camera, but the
surrounding silver lens ring and the “black hole” of the lens always
show up in the final photo. Thanks for any suggestions…

Beverly A. Carter
Metalsmith

This is a very interesting topic which seems to be offering more
than the last time it was raised. I’m glad it’s come up
again though, as it coincides with me attempting to get half decent
shots with my new Nikon D40X DSLR.

My problem is that when I upload my images onto my computer, as each
one is being imported, I can see the true colours as they appeared
in real life, then as I click on each one to take a closer look, the
computer tells me it’s rendering the image, and the lovely vibrant
colours disappear and become horribly washed out colours which I
then have to go back and correct. I have trouble actually remembering
the true colours, whilst sliding various pointers on the screen.

I did a batch of pictures the other day and “developed” the first
picture to the point where I was happy with it, then copied those
settings and applied it to the rest of the pictures. It worked
pretty well and I just had to tweak exposure or brightness in a
couple of the pictures. Then for some reason, after cropping the ones
I wanted to use and saving them with appropriate names to the
appropriate files, when I uploaded the images onto Etsy, all the
colours were once again horribly washed out, as though I’d done
nothing to the pictures after they were imported into my computer.
Very frustrating indeed. I’m very new to this digital photography
lark and enjoy it to a certain extent but find it extremely
frustrating too. I’d rather do my own pictures though, as when my
husband does them for me, he doesn’t go far enough to get the image I
really want, just saying “it’ll be fine”, and then of course there’s
a limit to what you can do after the event. I guess you work harder
for your own images.

BTW, I’m using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to import and develop my
images and would be interested to hear from anyone who also uses the
same software. Sometimes I’ll load images into Adobe Photoshop to do
other things, for example putting text over my image when making my
Etsy banner, but usually I just use the Lightroom software.

Helen
UK
http://www.hillsgems.co.uk

Follow the steps from my earlier email. Try again and compare with
your trick with the filter 'sharpen/unsharpen'. Let me know your
finding. 

Well, I’m feeling pretty dumb since others are apparently getting
this… OK, now I understand about making the new layer, but I’m not
seeing which command you mean for “overlay”.

Noel

Beverly,

How do you keep the lens of the camera from showing up in the
jewelry? I've managed to block out the body of the camera, but the
surrounding silver lens ring and the "black hole" of the lens
always show up in the final photo. 

This is usually caused by the camera being too close to the object.
If your camera has interchangeable lenses, the correct lens to use
would be a real macro lens, probably in the 90 to 105 mm range,
which will allow you to capture a life-sized image from about 14
inches away.

If you are using something like the Nikon CoolPix series, without
interchangeable lenses, you are probably getting very close to the
object, a necessity (and a major drawback ) with these cameras.
Also, having to approach the subject very closely minimizes your
ability to provide proper frontal lighting to the object, in some
cases.

Even with a large format camera (4x5 and up), proper lens selection
is essential to minimize a reflection of the camera in a shiny
object. A “long” lens helps, but Photoshop is the final answer.

We really do need to use the proper tools to get the best results,
and this starts with lighting and choice of camera.

Wayne Emery

How do you keep the lens of the camera from showing up in the
jewelry? 

You cannot totally make it go away but a long focal length (170mm or
greater) macro lens is the typical solution, it makes the lens black
spot smaller as it is farther away from the work.

James Binnion
@James_Binnion
James Binnion Metal Arts

360-756-6550

I am missing something in this discussion.

I am using photoshop just to remove traces of dust, because no matter
how well you wipe jewellery, camera always find something. But
performing picture editing to the level described in this thread
borders on misrepresentation.

You may wind up with the good picture, but customer will reject the
actual piece when he sees it. I know I would !

Leonid Surpin
www.studioarete.com

HI Helen:

I use Lightroom as well, and I’ve found it’s saved my bacon more
than once. Finally, some way to find all those images I’ve taken
over the years.

If I want to find all my images of casting flasks (for a lecture) I
just search for “flask”. (This only works if you go to the trouble of
keywording all your images. But once you’ve done it, that’s it.
You’re done for good.) Get in the habit of doing generic keywording
during import, it’ll save much pain and trouble.

Meanwhile, what’s going on with Lightroom is that it’s reading the
generic camera data, and that’s what you see initially. You’re
shooting in RAW, right?

So it’s taking the raw image data, showing that for a second while
it sorts out all the various factors that the camera tells it were
applied, and then applying all of the settings the camera said
should have been used.

If you’re getting ‘dead’ images after the correction data has been
applied, clearly, the camera has taken it into its little head to be
wrong about something. Not horribly surprising. Jewelry’s a pretty
oddball thing to be shooting.

My first candidate for a wrong setting is your white balance. If
you’re shooting in RAW (and with a D40, you should be), the camera
records the setting it thinks should give the right white balance
for the image. It’s frequently wrong. The joy of RAW is that you can
correct for it easily, with no loss of quality.

(Until you know enough to know how (and when/why) to set a custom
white balance, leave the camera set in auto-white balance. That’ll
get you close, most of the time.) For serious work, take a shot of
the item with a greycard in the frame, and then a ‘real’ shot with
it out. Open the shot with the card in lightroom’s develop module
(press “D”) and under the ‘basic’ tab over on the right, the very
first thing is the white balance setup. (says ‘wb’.)

There’s an eyedropper on the left. Click on the eyedropper, and then
click in the middle of the greycard somewhere. Find a spot with no
highlights or oddball colored shadows. That’ll pull the image back
into a neutral color range, so your colors should at least be
accurate. They may not be bright enough to suit you, but they’ll be
right. Go back out to the grid view (press ‘g’) and control click on
the image you just fixed. A popup menu should appear. Under ‘develop
settings’, near the top of the sub-popup that appears, is a command
for ‘copy settings’. Select that. A whole new menu will appear,
allowing you to decide just exactly which settings you wish to copy.
At this point, just copy the white balance. (the box is top left.)
hit OK, and everything will disappear, leaving you back in the grid
view. Select the ‘real image’ (and anything else you shot under the

exact< same lighting conditions), and then control click, and
select ‘develop settings’ and highlight ‘paste settings’. That’ll
paste your white balance settings into all those other images, and
pull them all back to neutral color. Again, the exposure may or may
not be right, but at least the white balance will be good. Going
forward, buy a grey card, and use it religiously at the beginning of
every serious shoot. If you have old images that don’t have the a
grey card, you can pull the same stunt by finding something in the
image that should be a neutral grey, and clicking on that with the
eyedropper. Keep in mind that if you guess wrong, you’ll be tweaking
your colors off into never-never land, as lightroom forces the whole
image to act as though whatever you clicked was neutral grey.

The next sliders under the temp & tint sliders for the white balance
are the exposure/recovery/fill light/black sliders for exposure
adjustment. Below them are sliders for brightness and contrast. Feel
free to fiddle with those to your heart’s content. The nice thing
about RAW and lightroom is that unless you go out of your way to
create a problem, the edits you make are non-destructive. You can
always go back and fix them without degrading your image. This is not
always the case with photoshop itself…

I suppose I should also clarify what I mean by neutral grey. Grey
cards are two things: (A) they’re 18% reflective, so they’re a very
particular balance point, but more importantly (B) they’re a
chromatically neutral grey. That’s the part that matters to
lightroom. It doesn’t care that the greycard should expose to 50%
lightness, it cares (a lot) that it expose to the same exact
percentages of red, blue and green in the image data. So if the
incoming data says that the card is 45,56,72 (percent Red, Blue &
Green, respectively) it knows that if you hit the eyedropper on that
area, it needs to tweak the image data back so that that area reads
56,56,56. (or whatever value) The point being that it forces them to
be the same value, so that the targeted area becomes chromatically
neutral. All other colors in the image are tweaked accordingly, but
it doesn’t really care about using the grey card for exposure, just
color balance. There are other things (like Macbeth cards) that are
better for evaluating exposure and tonal range, but that’s a very
deep rabbit hole indeed. For now, for basic work, a grey card is the
first step.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Brian Meek.

How do you keep the lens of the camera from showing up in the
jewelry? 

I find it’s pretty easy to Photoshop it out… you can use a
combination of the healing brush and a little smear/blur to make any
camera reflection unrecognizable.

Jeff Miller

I'm not seeing which command you mean for "overlay". 

I’m working on a Mac and I’m assuming Photoshop is pretty much the
same everywhere. In your Layers palette there’s a box near the top
that says “normal.” These are layer modes; how this layer interacts
with the others. Look in there, and “overlay” is about halfway down.

Hi Helen,

My problem is that when I upload my images onto my computer, as
each one is being imported, I can see the true colours as they
appeared in real life, then as I click on each one to take a
closer look, the computer tells me it's rendering the image, and
the lovely vibrant colours disappear and become horribly washed out
colours which I then have to go back and correct. 

Here’s what’s happening with your pictures: When you are uploading
from your camera or card into Lightroom the “profile” attached to
the image is either coming out of your camera as “Adobe RGB 1998” or
it is being converted to that when it enters the Lightroom software
which offers both RGB and Adobe workspaces. When you then upload to
Etsy, which I’m sure supports only standard RGB profiles, you are
seeing the washed out effect.

Somewhere in lightroom are two ways to deal with this: One, there
should be, probably in Preferences, a way to make sure the profile
attached to your pics comes into Lightroom as RGB, not Adobe. Two,
there should be a command, probably under edit, to re-assign profiles
once an image has been uploaded.

RGB is the internet color standard consisting of 255 colors per
channel. Adobe RGB 1998 is the printing industry’s standard color
pallette, much expanded from RGB, but basically unreproducible on a
monitor screen. The full range of colors only shows up in print.
However, when you shift from a program supporting Adobe to one that
does not you get the noticable shift in contrast and density that you
have seen.

I hope this helps,

Sincerely,
Les Brown
L.F.Brown Goldwork

If you are taking the image into Photoshop afterwards, you can angle
the camera so you are shooting at just enough of an angle that the
lens isn’t reflected. This will skew your picture slightly, but you
can correct for that in Photoshop.

Beverly,

Macro mode and as much OPTICAL zoom as possible. The idea is to get
the camera as far away as possible (=smaller black hole)

Long ago (with a real film camera and borrowed equipment) I used a
combination of a telephoto lens and close up bellows or extension
tubes; full frame ring shots from 6 feet away in a totally dark room.
An expensive set-up but you needed a loupe to see any camera
reflections.

Jeff

Demand Designs
Analog/Digital Modelling & Goldsmithing
http://www.gmavt.net/~jdemand

HI Helen:

There are a couple of answers for how to get rid of the camera and
lens in the reflection.

As several people have mentioned, a long lens on a DSLR is the
easiest answer to minimizing it.

My trick is/was to sew up a white nylon ‘snout’ that fits on the
front of my EZ-cube, and attaches to the front of my lens. That way
the only part of the camera (or room) that’s visible at all is the
face of the lens. It just becomes a black disk/dot that’s very easy
to photoshop out. Cost me all of about $4 worth of nylon.

The ‘serious’ way to do it involves secondary lighting and a beam
splitter. (you set up shooting through a pane of reflective glass set
at 45deg to your beam path, with a secondary light at 90deg to the
beam to generate fill reflection on the face of the beam splitter,
thus hiding the camera.)

Even I’m not that nuts. I’ve seen one of those rigs, once.
Photoshop pretty much killed them.

Regards,
Brian Meek.

But performing picture editing to the level described in this
thread borders on misrepresentation. 

No, Mr Surpin, picture editing as described here attempts to create
an image which accurately conveys the reality of the piece of
jewelry. My own work, which is mostly titanium and silver, is
incredibly hard to photograph accurately. Even with the best efforts
of a fine professional photographer, and whatever editing in
Photoshop will help, I am constantly told that my images do not do
justice to the pieces as they are seen “in the flesh”.

Certainly these techniques can be used dishonestly, but as you
point out, there isn’t much point in the long term.

Noel

But performing picture editing to the level described in this
thread borders on misrepresentation. 

Ditto. I’ve stated the same here before when the discussion was on
jury photos. It’s a slippery slope on what is cleaning up and what is
misrepresentation.

Rick Copeland
Silversmith and Lapidary Artisan
Rocky Mountain Wonders
Colorado Springs, Colorado
rockymountainwonders.com

For viewing my photos on the computer screen or for printing them I
would generally choose an over exposed image (light and bright), add
contrast in Photoshop CS3 and then save in PSD format. The photos
looked really nice.

Recently I set up a web site. With CS3 I open the photo, crop and
determine image size and then save the photo for web and devices. The
resulting photos on my site were awful - totally bleached out. I had
to re-work every photo.

I think that this happens because the original RAW file is a minimum
of 4.5 MB and the final photo on the web site is max 40K. To reduce
the file so much a lot of data must go and you lose detail, color and
contrast.

What little I know about working with photos I learned on Adobe’s
tutorial site, www.lynda.com. Usual disclaimer.

Lois Martens
www.loismartens.com