When it comes to your jewellery photography, you may find that you require more than just the standard adjustments at times. Either you want to take fewer images by utilising one shot to represent several varieties of stone or metals, or you need to get rid of unsightly light streaks and spots in the image.
Both of these scenarios are possible. In this section, we will go through how to carry out those tasks.
There will be situations in which the fundamental modifications that I covered in the last section, “Editing and Clipping Your Jewelry Photos,” would not be sufficient. Have you completed your initial round of revisions before we go on to the next step?
Before moving on to these more complex editing techniques, it is imperative that you first finish editing at the basic level. The following fundamental revisions need to be finished first:
- Aspects of Brightness and Contrast
- A Perfect White Balance
- Ambiance/Luminance (aka adjusting the highlights, shadows, whites, & blacks)
Consider “universal edits” to be an analogy for essentials. As long as you maintain the same configuration for your camera and lighting throughout the production, you should be able to convert them into a preset and use them for the entirety of the shoot.
The next set of adjustments that we’ll be discussing can sometimes be grouped together with the basic modifications in a preset, but other times, they only apply to a single picture and cannot be applied generally. We’ll go through both of these possibilities in the next section.
Curves
Curves were briefly covered in the blog post titled “Basic Edits,” but I’ll go over them in further detail here since using them to edit photographs of jewellery may be a very effective way to enhance their appearance.
Utilizing the Curves tool, you are able to make precise adjustments to the range of shadows, midtones, and highlights in the image.
You can see that there is a line running from the bottom left corner all the way up to the top right corner in the image that is shown below. The blacks of the image are depicted in the top left corner, while the whites are shown in the upper right corner.
Putting It to Use
You may make changes to the curves tool by first generating points and then moving those points around. As can be seen, there have already been two points accumulated: one for the whites, and another for the blacks.
The darker portions of the image may be made lighter by dragging the black point upwards. While continuing to pull the white point down will cause the highlights to get darker.
You have the ability to alter any point, as well as add additional adjustment points at any point along the line. To add a point anywhere along the line, just click anywhere along the line, and then drag either up or down to adjust the brightness or darkness of that particular region.
Let’s imagine you want to give your image more contrast; in that case, how precisely would you use the curves tool to accomplish that goal? You will end up with something that is called an S-curve.
In order to do this, you must first ensure that the white and black points remain in their current positions before adding a highlight point and a shadow point. To form an S-curve, just raise the point at which the highlight is located while lowering the point at which the shadow is located.
You have complete control over the degree to which you wish to change the image’s highlights and shadows in order to get the ideal contrast for the photograph you are working on.
Whenever I want to give something a “matte” appearance, I first create two points close to the black section of the line, and then I drag the black point upwards. It will give a previously black region a grey appearance.
Histogram
The histogram of the image is depicted by the graph in a lighter shade of grey that can be seen behind the line. A histogram is a graphical representation that shows how much of the image falls into each of the four tonal range sections.
If there was a significant rise on the left side of the image, then it contains a greater proportion of dark tones than bright tones. And vice versa, if there was a bump on the right side of the image, it indicates that your picture has a greater proportion of lighter to darker tones.
Reds, Greens, & Blues
It’s possible that you’re considering how the curves tool appears to be overly simplistic for its inclusion in the expert jewellery editing blog. The capability of the curves tool to modify not just the tonal range (the range of the picture from whites to blacks), but also the range of the image’s reds, greens, and blues, is what sets it apart from other image editing tools.
You will see that there is a dropdown menu with the letters RGB located directly above the adjustment area. That indicates that you are now making modifications to the image’s reds, greens, and blues.
It is important to be aware that there is a distinction between the primary RGB adjustment, which you are already familiar with from the fundamentals section, and the modifications that take place when you use the curves tool to play about with only the reds, greens, and blues by themselves.
If you were to adjust the blue curves, you would notice that dragging the line up will not lighten the blues; rather, it will add more blue to whichever area (highlights, midtones, or shadows) you adjusted.
This is the case regardless of whether you adjusted the highlights, the midtones, or the shadows. By lowering the line, you won’t make the blues darker; instead, you’ll either reduce the amount of blue in that tonal range or add more yellow to it.
How precisely does this apply to real-world situations? You may take a picture in which the shadows have a bluish cast to them, but the remainder of the picture appears to be in good shape.
Instead of having to make an adjustment that has an effect on the entire image and then mask off the areas that you do not want it to strike, you can instead use the curves tool to specifically target the blue shadows in the picture.
Restoring Photos That Have Been Overexposed or Underexposed
Images of metals that have been improperly exposed will have almost no visible structure. Because shade and features are no longer discernible, for instance, wire begins to take on the appearance of a flat sheet of metal.
If you want to prevent this problem, you should strive to take pictures of your jewellery with the right exposure, and then worry about editing your final shots to repair an under- or overexposed backdrop.
The background does not hold quite the same significance as your jewellery does. One useful piece of advice is to capture your photographs in the RAW format. Raw stores more information than jpegs do, which means that if you make a mistake, you will have an easier time repairing the parts that are white or black.
However, there are situations when you wind up with a piece of jewellery that is either overexposed or underexposed; thus, let’s speak about how to correct that.
To begin, we will review the masking techniques. You’ll find that most of the time, the jewellery will be either too light or too dark in comparison to the backdrop, in which case you’ll simply need to make adjustments to the piece itself.
Read the post entitled “Editing and Clipping Your Jewelry Photos” on our site if you are unfamiliar with how masks work. Because I will be referring to masking numerous times in the next sections of this post, being familiar with it is strongly recommended.
We regret to inform you that there will be situations when editing will not be able to correct your image. It is possible that you should just snap the shot again rather than wasting an hour trying to fix an image that cannot be fixed. You’ll have a solid sense for what can and can’t be rescued by editing as you get experience editing your jewellery pictures.
Exposure Tools
After you have finished creating your mask of the piece of jewellery, you may move on to editing it. You can choose from the following assortments of tools:
1.Levels are a tool that let you modify an image’s blacks and whites to your liking. Adjusting the output levels, which is the bar below the histogram, is something you need to do. Move the black slider to the right to underexpose the metals, and move the white slider to the left to overexpose the metals.
2.Exposure: When working with underexposed pictures, move the Exposure and Offset sliders to the right to add brightness. At the same time, push the gamma correction slider to the left; this will help eliminate the additional roughness that comes with underexposed metals. You should perform the reverse action for metals that have been overexposed.
3.In Camera Raw, the Blacks sliders can be found under the Basics menu. Here, you will want to concentrate on making adjustments to the Exposure. When working with underexposed metals, you will want to enhance the exposure, shadows, and blacks.
If there are a lot of scratches, you may even want to lower the texture and clarity. You will want to adjust the exposure, whites, and highlights for the metals because they are overexposed.