Photographing jewellery isn’t as easy as it seems. Photographers should find the way to take great pictures of the items. They should be aware of sharpness, lighting, and exposure, and the way to adjust them in each situation to get great photos.
When it comes to Jewellery Photography, a lot of jewellery shop owners are afraid about how tiny, sparkle and classy the products can be.
But photographing jewellery can, in fact, be easier than taking photos of larger items because it is alot easier to put it’s part together.
You can start taking more awesome photos of jewellery with the tips below.
Table of Contents
1- Importance of light in Jewellery Photography
Photographing shiny jewellery by using the camera’s flash is not a good idea because the jewellery will reflect the bright light; thus the product will be covered in white light spots with unpleasant shadows in the background.
Use natural lighting to take jewellery photos . Always remember that by using natural lighting, you won’t need to use the sun as an indirect light source, so keep your product near a window during the day.
Bright sunlight reflects strong shadows, so you may like to spread the light. You can solve this problem by covering the window with a white material or a piece of paper, don’t cover them with other colors because they change the color of the light.
2- Manage reflections
Jewellery reflection means that it will take in all other colors, so you should photograph on a white background to avoid changing the color of the piece. White also reflects light, but dark colors absorb it, thus, if you shoot on a white background your jewellery looks greater.
Though taking good product images of jewellery is much harder than taking a good product image of something like a plain red table, jewellery does have the size advantage. No need for expensive setups. A piece of folded paper is enough. Putting a piece of paper around the camera blocks off reflections.
3- Keep Your jewellery clean and polished
Make sure that your jewelries are clean and polished, this helps you to take beautiful photos of your items. What may not look clear to the naked eye will be noticed as soon as it gets obvious in the highly detailed images you took by your digital camera.
If your jewellery doesn’t need deep cleaning, you can easily clean the dust and make the items shiny by wiping them down with a spongy, moist cotton or microfiber cloth before the shoot. You can wear cotton gloves as well, so you don’t leave your fingerprint marks every time you hold them.
4- Use a tripod to avoid camera shake
The camera shake is the worst thing may happen to any photographer. When photographing small things like pieces of jewellery any slight movement due to holding the camera with hands, will look as a blur in the photo.
To solve this problem effect, pick out for a tripod. The best thing to use is a removable tripod ball head.
The tripod ball head has fluid movement, this thing makes it easy to obtain the angle you want. When the head is unlocked, you can adjust the camera easily before turning the locking mechanism on the head to secure the angle you want.
5- Focus with accuracy in Jewellery Photography
Usually, in Jewellery Photography your aim is to highlight the star of the jewellery, like the main diamond or the glamour on a bracelet, so what you need to do is use Auto Focus on your items. Yet, even in close-ups, the focus may keep off, so you have to verify it later by examining the photo and zooming in for a closer look. If it’s not clear, refocus, check, and lock it.
When the shoot ends, assure that you also have good shots where you have the entire piece of jewellery in focus. If you’re shooting for a catalog and they only have space for one or two item images, that need to show every small detail of the jewellery, this works well. It may seem unworkable even with a wide depth of field, but you can gain this with focus stacking. This technique will give you the chance to shot various photos with each part of your jewellery in obvious and sharp focus, so you can get images in a way that everything is in focus.
6- Try moving GIFs
Moving GIFs can actually add a great effect, the advantage of them is that they don’t take a lot of time to load as video. Using moving GIFs doesn’t mean that you want all the images to move. Few images of the items can get the buyers’ attention and show them how an item moves.
7- Feature Contrasting Colors
If you like to create durable and stunning images, you can feature contrasting colors by putting your jewellery on appealing and colorful surfaces. Try this and see the type of photos you can take when you apply balancing colors with your pieces of jewelry.
Using a strong color or other shades of the same color makes your products be notable. Keep in mind that it’s better not to exaggerate in using shades because this can lead away your viewers’ attention from the main subject.
8- Care for the details and enable zoom
If you can shoot high- resolution photos and capture the details of the product, you can enable zoom on your online store.
Enabling the zoom functionality on your website will let the buyers click and enlarge the image to be able to see every part of your item. Showing the details to the buyers because this gives them the chance to see the side or back of the product and the type of clasp it has.
By giving details about photos, the buyer will know what to wait for when he receives his order.
9- Edit the jewellery photos
Photographers have two different opinions about editing photos after Jewellery Photography. Some of them believe that all photos should be untouched, and others who think photos should be edited. Actually, it’s better not to edit the items because we like to show customers how jewelries look like in the reality. But at the same time, editing makes the photos look more shiny and beautiful. Photoshop are also used by some photographers. GIMP is a free software, it is so similar fully version of photoshop, you can use it for editing, or use online editors. There are different types of editing tools like; Phase One’s Capture, Adobe’s lightroom and so on.