Diamond Needs Color

[Eleanor]

Hello Retouchers,

Nice to find this forum. I've spent my day hemming and hawing over an image and would love to have input on. My primary photo retouching is done on digital images that I have taken of jewelry. I am relatively new to this but have enough experience to make a pleasant photograph for the web and small print. I just completed a engagement ring set. It was very time consuming and difficult all around but I learned some new tricks so it was worth it. Here is the problem. When the client looked at the image she said that diamonds refract light in the form of color and that this image does not show the color refraction. She then sent me an example of what she meant. I've spent a little time fidgeting with adding color to this diamond but have not come up with anything that I'm satisfied with. Does anybody have suggestions? I'm fairly comfortable with Photoshop and its lingo so feel free to get technical. Attached is my image (the 1st one) and hers (the second).

Thanks, El

[Xaran]

Added a multicolour fill in overlay mode at 60% opacity.

Christine

[Gary Richardson]

Did rough selection round stone. Created new layer. Created multi colour radial gradient and set blend mode to Soft Light, reduced opacity to 10% and blurred using Gaussian blur.

[MBChamberlain]

Hi El,

As near as I can tell from the picture you were sent there were three lights: a white primary key, an amber gelled fill and a green gelled fill. (Amber and green cancel each other out except in the highlights.)

To try to get a similar effect I did three things:

1. Added a gradient map, blended with color, merged with a copy of the original, blured, masked. This new layer should be blended with color.
2. Duplicate original layer and ran curves to look like the image below, blured, masked, and blended with color.
3. Hue/saturation to tweak it a bit.

Not as good as a reshoot, but it might work.

Michael

[T Paul]

You might try shooting the shot again and adjusting the lights to get more of a sparkle....

PhotographyJewelry Photography Tips

Jewelry Photography Help

Photoshop
Creating a sparkle-effect brush

Photoshop-wise...
Create a new layer
Add flecks of color and experiment with layer modes and adding inner/outer glows

[chrishoggy]

Deleted and leaving this forum due to the actions of member rondon

[Mike]

Some thoughts:

In the photo supplied by the customer, if you look there appears to be "sparkles" in all colors of the spectrum. One can get that effect by passing a beam of white light through a prism. I am wondering if the cut of the stone has made a number of prisms, on different planes, so if you get the beam of light and the camera angle just so, you get the multi colored sparkles? One of the reasons I think this is the "hardness" of the light in the sparkles. All of the efforts that have been done in PS seem to lack this "hardness" quaility, their sparkles are kind of soft looking.

If the cut of the stone really is a factor in this, then you may not be able to duplicate the effect in the ring you have because of the difference in the cut.

I would like to place a disclaimer here. I have not shot a lot of jewelry, have not ever been faced with this, so I could be right, just as easily be wrong.

Hope you will let us know how this comes out...

Thanks

Mike

[glikster]

I personally think that the hard spots of color is ugly, so I tried to make it more muted. I used two gradient layers set to Soft Light with layer masks and lower opacity.

[Sean2]

I haven't tried this one, but I wonder about trying the following:

Dupe the background

Insert a new layer under the dupe and add "Flare" for color

Assess lighting & bkgrnd you wish stones to be shown under, and fill over flare with one color versus many (use flare to split spectrum) - conversely, select flare and use single column command placed in center of flare to set light direction/flow/

Mask and reduce opacity till happy :?)

Just a thought...

Sean

[Mike]

Originally Posted by glikster

I personally think that the hard spots of color is ugly, so I tried to make it more muted. I used two gradient layers set to Soft Light with layer masks and lower opacity.

But remember that he is doing this for a customer. Despite our personal feelings, quaility is determined by the person with the check book

Mike

[Eleanor]

Wow! What a wealth of information. This will probably take me a bit to digest but I just wanted to say thanks to all of you who spent some time solving this problem. To those of you who had questions about the lighting of the client's image I wanted to give a quick response. Her image was photographed in her store which has many overhead spotlights. The spotlights are not multi colored. It is the hardness and directness of her lights that create that colorful light show in the diamond. My lighting on the other hand is diffused and this creates a different affect with the diamond.

T Paul thanks for the links. They look very interesting.

glister, your image looks the most like the images that I see in jewelry trade magazines in which the diamonds are retouched with color.

For those of you who are wondering, diamonds in advertising often lack color and more closely resemble the image that I took than the one that was provided by the client.

Thank you all again and I look forward to participating in future discussions.

Eleanor

[Eleanor]

Here is the finished image which the client liked. Yeah! I ended up masking small facets in the stone that already showed a little color and increasing saturation, adding a gradient or using selective color to enhance areas. I also darkened the stone overall and increased the contrast.

I'm so glad to have this particular project out of my life. I shot this ring multiple times and was never really satisfied with the way it looked. It is difficult to work with an image you don't like in the first place. But I did learn a lot. Thanks again folks.

El

[1STLITE]

Well, I guess I missed the boat on this one. But when I read it I saved the images and decided I woudl give it a try, but only now got to play with it. THis is what I came up with, in three different versions.