Retouching Jewelry Challenge

[SteveB2005]

Folks. Here is a beautiful brooch digitally photographed but needs some serious retouching to bring out its potential. The piece needed cleaning and the camera picked up everything. People here create miracles. Can anyone do something on this image, that was straight out of the camera and make it look like a catalog shot? If you have the time, give it your best shot and tell us how you did it. Thanks. steveb

[Kraellin]

hi steve,

and welcome to RP!

indeed, it is a nice piece of jewelry. so, i had a look at it. i'm attaching three variations of roughly the same style. these all basically involved several layers. there were three adjustment layers alone, contrast/light, curves, and hue/sat/light. the hue/sat/light was used to bring out the color of the gem a bit more by increasing primarily the saturation. contrast layer was, to well, give the whole a bit more contrast.

another layer used was one of 'ivy's gradients' applied to the layer as a fill layer. the one used was a black and white with a sort of 'peak' in the middle. this is what gave the shadows on the left in the one image.

in one of the three images i made a new raster layer over the base layer and airbrushed in some red to give the gem more color. i blurred this layer with a guassian blur to smooth things a bit.

in another image i added a starburst to the ivy's gradient in such a position and way as to make the gem stand out and shine a bit more.

in yet another layer i selected out just the gem to a layer and just the background to another layer. to the new gem layer i altered the colors much brighter and gave it more of a yellow cast to try to highlight the gem. i believe to this layer i used a blend of soft light.

sorry that these tips arent in any given order so that you can see what was done specifically to each image, but it was late and i didnt really keep track of the workflow of each image. nonetheless, these tips shld help you come up with something on your own.

Craig

edit: there was also a little bit of smudging done on one or two of these to get rid of some noise on the gem (part of which i created), and to smooth down that pinkish shadow on the left.

i didnt do anything to the parts between the 'limbs' of the gem that showed the background, but something could be done there to make things better too.

[NancyJ]

Mostyl I just adjusted the colours and used masked blurred layers to correct the grain/dirt and brightened the stones in the first picture, in the second I tried to add a little more shine.
I'm not 100% happy with this partially I tihnk it was the quality of the original image but mostly lack of talent on my part

[Kraellin]

nancyj,

i think you did a fine job on both. you might try for some lighting highlights here and there just to make it 'sparkle' a bit or to 'shine' the gold a bit.

Craig

[NancyJ]

had another go at adding some shine

[matrix7]

Super work on that brooch. I was gonna give it a go but I realized I should be working on a few projects I am coming up on a deadline for instead of having fun Once I get caught up though - haha!

I liked the way you smoothed out some of the artifacts Nancy on the gold, and Kraellin your gem looks awesome.

Very inspiring work here guys. Too bad they can't subit the full quality picture, it is so hard to work with little bitty pictures and make em shine. I am used to working with 12 Megapixel files and can pretty much zoom in on a nosehair without losing quality so I guess I need to work on my technique and quite depending on big honkin files :-)

Great work guys keep it up.

[SteveB2005]

Hi Folks. Glad you all took the time to improve the image of the brooch. The org photo is not the best, but I know that's why there are retouchers. Keep it comin' and thanks. steveb

[Kraellin]

thanks, matrix7

nancyj, i like how you brought out the gold in that 2nd one. nice job!

Craig

[Panpan]

The diamond facets are blurred in the original. I think detail there is key to a good result.

Pierre

[creeduk]

Yes, panpan is right even if you maybe do a macro shot of the diamonds and then they are added back on the image now with good details. Here is my go, I changed the background as I felt it helped bring out the brooch. Enhanced some detail, smoothed other areas. not happy about how the metal came out. I think it maybe a white gold so tried to not over "gold" it but still needs more of something.

[Cassidy]

Motion Blur on the noisy bits, colouring via a new layer, duplication of some diamonds and then mainly blending and tonal fixes followed by a final levels adjustment

[Cassidy]

That's a question I wanted to ask, is this actually a gold brooch as it photographs in the same shadings as does my whitegold ring?

[vchiline]

late posting... but also my first....

Here's my attempt..... lots of blurs (gaussian, motion, smart), ajustment layers (hue/sat, levels), and inlaying.

Since we didn't know what type of gold this was, I did one yellow and one white one...

[palms1]

Vadim welcome to retouch marvelous job i can see you will be a asset

Interesting thread so i have "tried it out too " not a serious improvement but just to see if i could achieve anything of this sort, but of course nothing in the class of what has already been posted but it was a change and fun


Creeduk love the change in background

Palms

[LonK]

Indeed a very nice brooch. Since it's obviously a fish, I simply rotated it first so it is swimming rather than diving. This made further manipulation much more comfortable. From there I made various adjustments (curves, hue/sat) similar to what others did to perk it up and smoothed the surfaces a bit.