Photoshop an Engraving on Jewelry

Learn about using the warp tool and how it can create company & personal engravings. See how the warp tool can be a powerful tool for enhancing and retouching jewelry surfaces and textures

Tiffany Style Retouching

A Tiffany photo look is easily achievable in minutes without a complicated lighting or camera setup. How do we prove this? We used a Nikon Cool Pix 8700, hot lights, diffusion paper, and black cards. The result: a solid "branded" look that took minutes.

Watch Photography

This webcast covers a full length project covering how to photograph a watch. A member request was made specifically to explore watch photography further. The techniques we show give you huge flexibility when producing a final image for watches and other jewelry. Watch the wrap up to see what is covered.

Jewelry Photography Lighting

This chapter introduces the different equipment the market offers for jewelry photography. The lessons are not meant to recommend one over the other. In other chapters, we discuss the actual outcome and variances in how each setup affects how we photograph jewelry, and how are final product is impacted. This chapter is an introduction to strobe lighting, incandescent lighting, and "out of the box" products for jewelry photography.

Photographing Loose Diamonds

In this chapter we cover photographing loose diamonds. For this setup, we complete the project using "hot lights", light modifiers, a Canon 30D, and Photoshop. This is a complete project chapter, and covers all steps involved in photographing, lighting, and retouching loose diamonds. Loose diamond images are very valuable for any online or brick and mortar jewelry retailer or jewelry photographer. In this chapter, we use our finished, loose ascher cut diamond image, to replace round diamonds set in a basket stud setting, and “create” a new piece. Loose diamond images can be used for many purposes. This includes; engagement ring builder tools, diamond stud builders, and other solitaire and engagement jewelry lines offered with different shaped diamonds.

Diamond Bracelet Photography

This chapter covers shooting diamond jewelry. Included is the light, camera, and Photoshop techniques we use to create the images sampled. The main objective of this series of lessons is to give a thorough guide for how we photograph bracelets. In the last lesson for this chapter we will also make a composed image using our single bracelet photograph, and other jewelry items. The lesson topics covered are: Lighting for photographing a diamond tennis bracelet, the camera setup, styling, and retouching the image in Photoshop. This is an excellent introduction to "creating" a shadow in Photoshop. Part of prepping the image is to isolate, or "cut it out" from its original background. We then are able to apply dynamic shadows with character and direction to the photograph.

Colored Diamond Jewelry Photography

How do you photograph colored diamonds? The process is very similar to regular diamonds. In this chapters lesson we cover the light setup for shooting colored diamonds, retouching the photograph, copying the image to create a composition, and manipulating the shadows in Photoshop to emulate natural shadows.

Make a FREE Jewelry eCatalog

Create an eCatalog in just minutes. Prep your image files, save them in the right image folder, specify the file names in the configuration file using a text editor or Dreamweaver, and upload the folder contents. Vwala...easy, fast, and REALLY a great resource. Branch out to customers who can access your catalog on the fly. Instead of being a catalog on the shelf of a retailer, a wholesaler, or a consumer, make your catalog a "bookmark". Include the link in your email signature. Increase the views on your product by making it easy on you AND more importantly your customer.

Lighting Bangles & Large Polished Jewelry

This webcast covers shooting large pieces that have consistent form and texture throughout. The lighting challenge for these pieces is to have the light consistently "sweeping" across the piece. Regular lighting setups, which can be forgiving on pieces with more textured and varying forms, do not work across the board. The setup we discuss describes minimalistic lighting that doesnt take away from, but rather, enhances the simple forms and contours.

Gemstone Jewelry Photography

This full project includes retouching a gemstone ring, managing colors to create multiple stone variations, choosing a prop, and placing and styling rings on the stock photography prop in Photoshop.

Photoshop Jewelry on a Model

Email blasts get sent out every day from all different types of jewelry businesses. Many of the emails that people get feature 2 things: a piece(s) of jewelry and a model wearing the jewelry. What is often butchered is the combining of the model and the jewelry. This lesson covers how to successfully Photoshop jewelry on to a model for ads in print or web.

Illustrating Jewelry from Scratch

Illustrating jewelry for display purposes is a powerful tool to have available. Develop product, share ideas, communicate with manufacturers, and create images for display. Tiffany.com currently has great jewelry images on the homepage of their site. We recreate the image and explain 16 steps to emulate the same process and discuss the approach to retouching and other similar projects and goals.

Styling Jewelry for Advertisments

Jewelry Photography styling using Photoshop's robust and dynamic program can create stunning results days, weeks, or even years after the initial image was created. Tweaking, is a true understatement. Take control of you style with these demo videos.

Photographing Jewelry on a White Background

If you open most any fashion magazine, you will see a classic fashion photography style used to create a "blown out" background and a correctly exposed subject. In this chapter we take the technique used in fashion photography and apply it to jewelry photography. Using the regular tools we keep handy for our "set" building, we create a miniaturized version of a classic fashion shoot setup and simulate the "blown out" background environment for hanging jewelry. This works best for necklaces, pendants, earrings, and watches too. *Note: rings are not well suited for this setup.* In addition to creating a set that we can photograph our jewelry items and get a white background coming from the camera, we also cover Photoshop techniques to remove blemishes, correct color, and apply a natural looking shadow.

Creating Ideal Highlights

Photoshop is great. If you produce great images with any tool, you have succeeded. Making that easier however, comes from getting the most out of your photography and lighting. This setup incorporates new tools and adjustment and emphasis on previous tools.

Cameras for Jewelry Photography

This chapter is geared towards introducing you to the different digital cameras available for photographing jewelry. This illustrated guide, examines what what components are different in each camera and how the different technology affects your final jewelry image. We cover all cameras that are appropriate for photographing jewelry. They include: digital point and shoot cameras, DSLR cameras, and medium and large format cameras equipped with digital backs. The lessons in this chapter discuss the basic principles that separate each camera, but also how they all have shared components that create a very similar end result. The variance in quality that the cameras we discuss for jewelry photography produce, largely, comes from the entire process of lighting, photographing, and editing. All subjects that are covered in chapters explaining how to photograph jewelry. Our motto is, "Its not what you have, it's what you do with it." In this chapters lessons, we go over examples of images that come from different cameras and setups and how each element in the process affects the final product.

Image Exposure Basics

For those new to jewelry photography, and looking to become more familiar with how the camera and lighting interact and relate to watch other, this chapter provides a "crash course" overview.

Light Modeling for Jewelry

The pin we shoot in this webcast has a number of different textures created by the varying materials. This chapter includes lessons that show the light setup for creating the image, how we edit the image, and techniques for editing this item with minimal Photoshop work. *Note: The image above has a Photoshop created shadow. The lessons in this chapter include techniques for creating a shadow that requires less "shadow painting" in Photoshop. Other chapters and lessons however, do cover the techniques we use to take an image we have pathed and apply shadow simulation techniques using Photoshop.* Topics covered in this chapter include; lighting for jewelry with varying components/materials, creating a custom "light box", and easy Photoshop editing of our jewelry.

Engagement Ring Photography

Engagement rings, rings in general, and diamonds are all there own beast unique consideration. It is difficult to recommend a setup, or rather, a big responsibility to be in charge of saying "I think this is the best way to do it". There are a number of styles of photography in actuality. Engagement rings have been broken down into just a few styles for photography that you see in past "branded advertisement" images and every trend that has developed since. The lighting setup you can have like the one described in this video and others, will work VERY well, despite the challenge.... It will not let you down. You will be able to take consistently GOOD "out of the camera" images, AND great retouched ones. I think it is such a good setup, that I would recommend ANY piece be shot using it.

Styled Watch Photography

This chapter covers the elements that go into creating successful watch photography. Watches, in general, have three characteristics to note when we decide on a lighting setup. They are: the face, dial, and band. The lessons cover how to setup lighting to accommodate for each part of the watch. The setup for photographing watches is not the same as jewelry because of the nature of how a watch is made. In upcoming webcast, we will be covering how to photograph a watch to capture all elements, but the dial. We will then create a new environment for the dial and photograph that part of the watch separately. Photoshop enables us to easily combine 2 photographs, which in the case of watch photography, is sometimes very useful.