Did you know that jewelry retouching is your best solution for standing in an ultra-saturated market? Most independent jewelers will agree that jewelry photography is one of the most challenging and intriguing activities in the jewelry business.
The pieces are highly reflective, the colored gemstones look dull when intricate designs are not captured properly. Meanwhile, size and lighting additionally play an important role in the production of a general quality image, often, even an accurate lighting setup is difficult to achieve. A lack of basic knowledge in commercial jewelry photography can easily sabotage your winning strategy despite the myriad developments in camera equipment.
Make no mistake about it, you don’t have to decide if you’re posting photos of your product. If you want your e-commerce product images to stand out in the eyes of your online customers, you must edit them. You just have to be more discriminated against with the help you render toward other people. Background removal, light adjustment, reflection and imperfection removal, shadow and contrast adjustment, and cropping and resizing can all be time-consuming tasks if you do not know what you are doing in Photoshop.
Take the time to learn how to use your company’s editing and better yet, outsource your post-production work to a professional photo editor in Pickup Media. We know how to create product images that will impress your customers and enhance the professional look of your website. Whatever you choose, keep in mind that if you want to make your online retail business a success, you need to make the quality of your product photography a top priority. Since customers can’t pick and touch your products, your e-commerce photography is meant to show them in the best light and convince buyers that they are worth the money.
Creates emotion through beautiful pictures
Nowadays, professional-quality jewelry images cannot be imagined without the help of jewelry photo editing services and other jewelry photo retouching techniques. It dramatically enhances their shopping experience while helping online jewelers to cement a wow effect on each capture. No matter how unobtrusive you may be to convince yourself that all shopping is about meeting material needs, several studies have shown that most shopping is emotional.
As a jeweler, I often hear most buyers say, I want this ring for my wife I am looking for a perfect necklace as an annual gift for my wife, my wife will surely love it! The statement proves that jewelry is all about emotions and these emotions should be reflected in the photograph. When a buyer looks at the pictures of your jewelry, it is important to understand how the jewelry will make the wearer feel. Dull, fuzzy, and extremely confusing jewelry will not show the real beauty.
The Basic Jewelry Retouching Processes
How to touch up a Ring: by Step Photoshop Tutorial
Clipping onto a white background
The use of white backgrounds in images is popular in the e-commerce industry, with many online retailers blaming it for their success. A piece of jewelry placed on a white background brings the subject to the fore and eliminates any confusion so that the customer can focus on the product himself. This outcome will happen when you use product photo editing service.
In this step, the metal and stone will be clipped into individual layers to achieve an endless white, non-scattered background. It is important to note that all the elements of jewelry must have their path and level because each element has to be edited separately. Setting applicable to metal layers cannot be applied to a ‘side-stone’ or ‘main-stone’ layer.
Notice how the ring comes to life against a white background. It shows how a white background photo attracts buyers’ attention and allows them to see every detail of the ring better than a white background image. To change the background into pure white you should use clipping path service as well.
To get accurate clips of rings and gemstones, we use the pen tool in Photoshop with a feather radius of 1-1.5 pixels.
Tips
Zoom in 250-300% as you go along-this allows you to see all the small curves you may miss.
If you want to make a sharp edge or change direction on your way, hold down the ALT/OPT key and change the point. This will allow you to quickly change the direction of the curve.
Create a new pen path for each element. Paths can be accessed through Window-> paths.
To quickly select your path: Right-click to select, or hold CMD click the thumbnail in the path window.
White background photography is a powerful online sales strategy because it creates real and tangible benefits for both buyers and jewelers. It represents a clear and detailed product, increasing conversions and sales, and driving more than 67 percent of online shoppers’ buying patterns.
Jewelry retouching process applicable for metals
There are three main processes involved in metal recovery
Removing dust
No matter how hard you try to keep your jewelry clean, there may be some dirt that is not easily seen with the naked eye. Ours is part of the pressure process involving the removal of dust, fingerprints, and anything else that becomes clear once you look at the jewelry picture.
There are many tools we use depending on the item and the situation. However, the quickest and easiest way to remove dust and fingerprints is:
Using the patch Tool
The patch tool is one of our favorites in terms of convenience. It represents a selected area with another selected source. The tool acts as a shortcut to the healing brush tool but again, a good surface is needed to replicate it.
Using the Healing Brush Tool
Healing brushes match automatically and with quality so the user only has to choose a texture of his choice and the rest of Photoshop works. This tool is effective when re-touching fingerprints and dust near the edges. The main advantage of using the healing brush tool is that you can save the base color and gradient while making a soft transition to the base image while removing dust. However, the tool relies on a source that is already smooth and nice copy.
Tidying up bad reflections
Taking a picture of a ring or any other piece of jewelry is almost like taking a picture of a mirror. It is glossy with a detailed design which contributes to reflecting about 99% of the light around it. Jewelry photo retouching is usually required when taking colored gem pictures. Although they are fascinating to look at, these gems are difficult to capture because their facets can create reflections that lead to unwanted ambiguity. Our touch-up process will solve this problem so you can show your best jewelry to your target buyers.
Bad reflection is common to all jewelry touch-ups, be it the reflection of the camera lens, the light bulb, or just the mannequin. We see the most common types of bad reflection shots that usually come from the rear shanks, metal, and main stones. The best way to fix this is to take pictures without bad reflections in the beginning. Taking a good original picture without bad reflections we recommend using the GemLightbox which is designed to capture pixel-perfect images using only one smartphone.
Jewelry Retouching: Color Correction
Jewelry photo retouching is important to get the right color. Fixing bad reflections as shown in the image and color correction are two important processes that can greatly improve the quality of the image. Color correction is most important in jewelry retouching. Many jewelers are concerned that their 18k white gold items may look like platinum or silver. Several methods can be used to change the brightness and color of the metal:
A Pickup Media, we’ve created custom rules for color tones so that all metallic tones are consistent with the same color and brightness. Sometimes we use Photoshop Lightroom and custom color matching plugins in Photoshop.
Jewelry Retouching: Gemstones and diamonds
Photographing diamonds and gemstones like this ring is one of the most complex aspects of jewelry photography. It creates various defects depending on the benefits of cutting and stone which often requires professional retouching assistance to correct. For example, excessive white light on a flat surface and incorrect position of the light on the side gems can cause one vision. The process at our touch is designed to eliminate these defects and to increase the actual depth and shape, clarity, and color of the stone.
These include some of the most effective tools for recovering diamonds and gemstones:
Jewelry Retouching: Brightness and contrast
This allows you to change the brightness of the color you need.
Levels
This will allow you to extract the shadows and highlights of the stone.
Hue and Saturation
Pick and choose the colors you want to take/keep
Jewelry Retouching: Un-sharp Mask
Undoubtedly one of the most important tools in diamond retrieval – it brings out all the small and big shots of your gemstone.
Smart Sharpen
More detailed sharp features are needed for side stones.
Create a natural shadow based on the ring’s position
While unwanted shades in images can turn buyers off and are often considered a nuisance, creating a natural shade based on the location of the ring will not only make jewelry look realistic and natural, it can increase your sales. It adds depth to the subject and makes the ring poke. The natural shade helps to entice buyers and this time their focus is only on keeping the article where you want it to be.
Selling jewelry in a highly saturated market is a challenge but not the end. Extreme effort is required from jewelers to crate for them and promote their brand. With proper marketing visual techniques and jewelry retouching service and professionals, it is worth the stress because saturation indicates a strong demand for the product.