6 Simple Ways to Edit Jewelry Product Photos Using Photoshop

Posted by James Scott on April 2nd, 2021

While product photography usually requires some amount of retouching to get rid of the visible blemishes in the photographs, it is highly essential to edit jewelry product photos very effectively and efficiently to make the product look realistic as well as more appealing to the customers. 

Photoshop is definitely the first choice for photographers and image editors to use photoshop tools to edit jewelry product photos and other Product photo editing photography images.

For jewelry product photo editing retouching tools can be of two types. One is the use of standard tools such as adjusting brightness, contrast, hue and more. 

Another one is the use of brush based tools which helps to make edits in specific areas of the photo. Although it is comparatively simple to use this tool, it gives you a lot of control to retouch your photos and images. 

Here are 6 simple ways to do jewelry product photo editing using photoshop for you.

1. Work on some basic adjustments

Some basic adjustments such as adjusting brightness and contrast makes the colors in your image pop up as the brightness tool helps to brighten up your image while the contrast helps to balance the images and make it distinguishable by adjusting the lighter and darker areas of the image. 

Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. See the impacts by moving the sliders around.

You can also try out dodge to adjust brightness and work on lightening specific parts of the photo. To edit jewelry product photos this brush based editing is very useful as it allows you to work on specific areas keeping the rest of the image untouched. 

To work with the dodge tool, choose the Burn tool, select a brush size and start working on the area you want to edit.

2. Use burn to darken specific parts of the image

This tool is the opposite of a dodge tool. It enables you to darken specific areas of the photos where you might need it. If you think you will get confused within the two, one simple way to remember is to think that burn means to turn things black and hence burn is used to darken specific image portions. 

3. Remove dust and scratches by spot healing brush

In product photography, this is one of the most frequently used retouching tools among brushes. Spot healing brush can help to remove dust, scratches, and other unnecessary spots that can be seen in the raw photographs of the jewelry.

To use the spot healing brush, select the tool and the brush size and click on the specific potions or areas where you want to modify or edit. What photoshop does is it replaces the clicked areas with the pixels around the area. 

In order to see sub icons, make sure to click and hold on the menu to work.

4. Duplicate for consistency

In cases where only one piece of the product is visually adequate whilst its counterpart throws the entire image off, it is generally recommended to remove the ‘bad’ piece completely and instead duplicate the ‘good’ one and make it look as natural as possible. To do this, however, it is very crucial to remember that the background is a white backdrop or is removable. 

The steps to do this in Photoshop are to use the ‘Marquee Selector Tool’ and select the piece of the image, then edit > copy, and after that, edit > paste. You will now be able to move the piece of image in any way you want.

5. Give gradient shine with the smudge tool

The brush-based smudge tool enables you to smudge colors in the specific portions of the photos and gives it a gradient shine as per your choice. Although the real picture looks comparatively fine, there will be few clients who would want that extra hint of drama in the picture. 

Choose the smudge tool, adjust the brush size, and click the portion of the image you want to smudge. 

6. Fix specific parts of the photo with a clone stamp 

It is not uncommon to see that sometimes two ends of the same image may have differences between them that directly affect the entire visual of the photo. 

For instance, in a jewellery product image, a particular part of the picture could have a shadow fallen over it that would imbalance the lighting of the whole picture. 

The easy fix to this would be to use the ‘Clone Stamp’ tool which will essentially allow you to copy an identical part of the image that has better lighting and then paste iron the poor one. 

To do this, follow these simple steps: Select ‘Clone Stamp’ tool > Select brush size > ALT + click the section that is to be copied > ALT + click on the section to be pasted on. 

Final Thoughts 

If you are willing to work with brushes, it all works the same way. You have to choose the tool, select a brush size and then begin brushing or working on that specific area you want to work on. 

You can start with the default settings which are on the top menu bar if you are a beginner and try out experimenting with the settings as you work. 

A lot can be done with Photoshop, but the tools listed above are the ones that are mostly used for jewelry photo editing services. Give the above techniques and tools a try and see the changes in your photographs.