Could someone help me with silver enhancement?

[Lynda99]

I'm retouching silver earrings for my own website. I've looked for a tutorial on retouching silver, but nothing really seems to apply.

The lever tops are my main concern. Someone posted this: http://www.davidyurman.com/catalogs/cablecandy.aspx

and it's helped me a lot. Right now I'm pretty much airbrushing to smooth the surfaces, and then increasing contrast, especially by using select>similar.

If someone with better skills could give me some hints, I would appreciate it very much.

[Swampy]

Lynda

I found the silver a little to red (red is good for gold highlights though) so I did a curves adjustment on a selectin of silver and decreased the red channel and increased the blue a smidgen. I only did the top portion of the earing.

Hope this helps.

[Lynda99]

I love the color change.

The areas of light and dark are also very uneven, and of course it looks worse when the contrast is increased. Any ideas how to smooth it out without doing so much work on them?

[Swampy]

You might duplicate the color corrected layer and set the dupe to multiply. Adjust th opacity to taste.

[Lynda99]

That worked also! Thanks so much...

[Alfred]

Here is a quick example of what I did.
Duplicated original and merge with hard light, flatten, applied USM with very high pixel value then I applied a little bit of smart blur. I don't know what smart blur is called in Photoshop but I know it is available. After all that I increased the saturation only on the beads.
What I would recommend is that you take better images in the first place! The lighting is not right, for this type of subjects, if you are using a light tent which seams to make the silver look flat then I would put a black reflector on one of the sides of the tent to get better definition of the objects.

[Lynda99]

They aren't shot in a light tent. The most important part is the body of the earring, and the crystal doesn't seem to benefit from a light tent. A black reflector discolors many of the crystals.

These were shot with a Canon 350D, a Canon 100mm macro lens, and Novatron Studio Flash.

Any suggestions on how to shoot them is appreciated.

[Alfred]

Sorry but I can not be any more specific on the lighting setup you are using, I shoot all my jewelry under a light tent with two 1600 WS strobes and sometimes I add a smaller directional strobe to light the stones up. I have never had a problem with using a black card when photographing stones. For me, the light tent is imperative when shooting jewelry, without it you will get all kinds of reflections which can take hours of retouching. Sometimes I spend an hour or two to get the lighting and contrast just right and then I start shooting.