My Tips for Editing Jewellery
Easy on the Skin Softening..
It’s so tempting when you’ve opened an image in light room and are in the process of zooming in on every little skin impurity to over work the skin softening but try to preserve some of that beautiful skin texture if not all of it for the sake of a more natural, beautiful overall image. Play around with the brush tool and just reducing the clarity alone, then just the texture. Perhaps just reducing one of them can have a more modest impact than the combination of both but just make sure to start in really small increments and keep zooming out to check your progress against the context of the full image.
Increase the Clarity..
This is a really simple one but key to making the all-important details pop. Take the brush tool, give the clarity a toggle upward and perhaps the contrast too and slowly go over any details of the jewellery that you want to emphasise. Again, working in small increments is better, even if it means you go over the same area a few times to get the desired result. This method works particularly well for anything engraved or embossed (as well as chain pieces) to really emphasise the design.
Get Playful with your Crops..
Stop thinking in right-angles and start experimenting with cropping on a jaunt! Sometimes finding an interesting cross section that shows more of the piece but is skewed at a playful angle can take an image that was destined for the recycling bin to becoming one of your favourite captures - this happens for me all the time! It also allows you to be more selective with what you include in the frame.
Get The Balance Right..
A simple but great formula to get started with balancing the lights and darks on your image is to reduce the highlights, bring up the shadows and then accentuate both the blacks and whites. I don’t usually like blanket approaches to editing (you’ll never see me anywhere near presets!) but as a rule of thumb rather than something you cut and paste, this is a great way to amplify your jewellery shots without blowing out those shiny highlights.
Take a Second Look..
Whatever you do, never EVER finish an edit and immediately hit send. And this doesn’t just apply to jewellery campaigns this applies to anything and everything. Pause. Make a coffee. Stretch your legs. Even sleep on it for the next week if you have a roomy deadline but just make sure to give those images one more expert glance-over before they arrive in your clients inbox because I guarantee that you will spot some adjustments you didn’t see before that really take the images to the next dimension.
