Upcoming Jewelry Retouch Show

[twopoint0]

Doug-

Thanks for asking me to do another jewelry retouching show. Since I haven't officially planned anything yet, I thought I'd open it up to suggestions from the RetouchPro community. If there's anything in particular viewers would like to see, post your comments here and I'll do my best to include them.

-Steve Koshlap

[Flashtones]

Hi Steve. You're pretty good with diamonds. I wouldn't mind if your show included how you rearrange facets and increase contrast/sharpness. I think you also had a good watch/splash shot I wouldn't mind seeing you cover.

[Wolfman]

I shoot a lot of jewelry for clients who want a white background..... do you have any secrets or shortcuts on making the background pure white without making the jewelry too bright.... I use many methods according to the brightness of the piece... curves, replace color, etc..... sometimes the piece has a lot of bright silver and it's difficult to brighten the background and also keep the shadow & jewelry in their natural state.... I shoot volume sometimes so recreating a shadow is time consuming.

[twopoint0]

Flash- Great suggestion on the diamonds!
Wolf- You might look into a green screen background system, otherwise it's all about masking the product, dropping out the background, then brushing the shadow back in from the layer mask. I'll try to demo the manual method.

[Flashtones]

Originally Posted by Wolfman

I shoot a lot of jewelry for clients who want a white background..... do you have any secrets or shortcuts on making the background pure white without making the jewelry too bright.... I use many methods according to the brightness of the piece... curves, replace color, etc..... sometimes the piece has a lot of bright silver and it's difficult to brighten the background and also keep the shadow & jewelry in their natural state.... I shoot volume sometimes so recreating a shadow is time consuming.

I've done a bit of this. Make two copies of your jewelry layer. One will be for jewelry, the other shadow. Use the pen tool to make a path around the item on the jewelry layer. Convert the path to an active selection. Add a mask to your jewelry layer. This will silo your product, revealing your shadow layer below. Put a curve on your shadow layer to send the whites white while not blowing out the shadow. Can even run a blur on the shadow layer to soften. Use any additional tools to get things to your liking. You might even want to put a solid white layer below your shadow layer and selectively mask the shadow layer to reveal the white below.

[BagLady]

Or you could create a mask by using the channel with the most contrast.... very fast and precise!

I'm sure that Steve will cover the subject if it works well with jewelry :-)