You’ll need photo editing software to resize your jewelry photos and optimize their appearance. This software is a wonderful utility that's easy to use and gives you control over the final appearance of your pictures.
Jewelry Photo Editing Software
Fortunately this software doesn’t have to be expensive. Although Adobe PhotoShop, which is loaded with incredible features, is probably the industry standard for photo editing, it’s also extremely pricey. And unless you’re really a photography pro, many of PhotoShop’s features will probably go unused by you—I know I wouldn’t understand or use most of them!
The photo editing software I use and love is Jasc's Paintshop Pro. It’s really easy to learn and use.
Your computer may even have come with photo editing software in its original software bundle; if you aren’t sure, check under “programs” on your computer’s hard drive.
Tips for Editing Jewelry Photos
Okay, now that you have your software, it’s time to edit your photo. Open the photo you’ve saved to disk or hard drive.
If the photo seems to need a bit more cropping, use your photo editing software’s cropping feature till you get the photo the way you want. One of the most important things to remember when photographing jewelry is to be sure your jewelry fills the photo.
If you’ll be using more than one shot of this piece of jewelry, consider featuring a small area of this photo (e.g., the most colorful part of the stone with a bit of the setting against it, or the most exquisite part of the bead work). Adjust your cropping borders till you have a neat, artistic, closeup view of a small area of the piece. Your viewers will think you've used a fancy zoom lens to treat them to a mega-closeup!
Use the photo editing software’s resize feature to make the final photo whatever size is best for how you plan to use the photo. For posting photos to forums, 200 to 300 pixels is a good amount for both height and width. For eBay listings, 350 to 400 pixels is good for both height and width.
Experiment with your editor’s sharpen feature. On some editors, this feature can result in a grainy look, so try it out and see what you think. If sharpen makes it grainy, try the editor’s unsharpen mask feature.
In spite of your best efforts to clean the scanner glass before photographing jewelry, the photo may still have a bit of lint, dust, or hair in it. Use the photo editing software’s scratch remover to make these quickly disappear.
Other features to experiment with from PaintShop’s Color-Adjust menu include
Hue/saturation/lightness (my favorite feature, and the one I use the most)
Brightness contrast
Highlight/midtone/shadow.
From PaintShop’s Effects-Enhance Photo menu:
Automatic color balance
Contrast enhancement
Saturation enhancement.
Warning: Don't Over-Enhance
Your Jewelry Photos
As you edit your photo, be careful--especially with the hue/saturation/lightness feature--not to enhance the stone’s appearance so that the photo doesn’t really represent the piece of jewelry. Buyers get very disgruntled about that, and I don’t blame them! You don’t want to be known as a jeweler who misrepresents your products. Your objective with photo editing is just to make your picture as clean, clear, and appealing as possible while accurately representing the appearance of the piece. No more and no less! :o)
When you get your photo clear, clean, bright, and sharp, save the file as jpg format. Don’t save your editing changes over the original file, because you may want to make different edits on this file later.
Now your new jpg file of the photo is ready to use! If the finished photo file turns out really super, you may want to write down the settings and adjustments that worked well for you, to help make photographing jewelry and photo editing a snap in the future!
