cheap jewelry retouching

[Kotekbury]

Hello everyone,
I am new here and this is my first post.
I am a beginner still life photographer and I am currently trying to get into the retouching world. This week challenge was to take a shot of a cheap ring and make it look twice as expensive in post production.
The below is 2$ fake gold ring, which I shot myself. I'm not yet familiar with any sophisticated techniques and the blow is an outcome of my trial-and-error approach.
As you can easily see some parts of the ring were redrawn from scratch. Afterwards I applied some gradients and finished it with burn and dodge.

I would appreciate your feedback (does it look like 4$ ring now ? )

[Repairman]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

Not bad but beware. Jewellers like the product to be pristine but also true to life. Metals should maintain their lustre, colour and reflective qualities whilst precious stones should have clear and unambiguous faceting. I'd experiment with getting the background right first; get that right and you'll cut out a load of unnecessary retouching later!

[Kotekbury]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

indeed, but I shot this badly on purpose just to make it difficult for retouching. That was the whole idea about this exercise. The struggle is to preserve the shiny bits as you rightly mentioned. thanks

[Cupcake]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

Nice job

[cardmaverick]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

That's great work, but it does kinda look a tad bit like an illustration. I think you'll do just fine with better images.

[Greg Curran]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

the illustration look is big over here so it is right in line with what I see in our local flyers, I would not be afraid to have a few almost black shadows in the dark areas, a lot more contrasty. Pure white highlights and really dark shadows, but other than that, nice job.

[nipond007]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

keep up man. You're just doing fine

[fattali]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

Nice job.
really I can't imagine how to achieve this work, can you please tell al least the principal treatment to achieve this work.
And sorry for my english

[Kotekbury]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

There is really no secret to it and nothing of fancy was used.

The below was my workflow:
- spot healing brush for basic cleaning
- clone stamp tool to straighten some lines and edges
- pen tool for selecting
- I created custom gradients for most of the metal surfaces based on the colors from the original image. Each piece had a separate gradient applied. I played with Layer style until I achieved good results.
- I added some Pixalete filter to restore/simulate some metal texture.
- the most important one: burn and dodge technique to achieve all the shadows and highlights.

Most of the time was spent on experimenting but once I got hold of it it was just matter of a 3-4 hours.

I'm sure more experienced members could add some improvements

[kav]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

I like it, but I might go a little more even with the highlight levels when it comes to the brightest spots. The only one that feels really out of place visually is the one in front. It doesn't really have much of a falloff, and it's a bit more grey than the others. It's also in kind of an odd place. Out of curiosity did you draw the background? I don't mind it at all, but the lack of feathering on the outline doesn't quite match the somewhat out of focus look of the background elements. Just a small amount of feathering would probably fix that.

[fattali]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

thinks Kotekbury for your answer
I want to share with you this tutorial, it's in french but I'm sure you will understand what about. clic

[luciachan]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

Jewellery looks good... I'd suggest adding more shading under the object to give it more pop

[capice]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

well done...looks like Genia Larionova's workflow a bit...For me the retouched item could do with a bit more glow on the metal, it looks a bit like plastic now...

[bkztx]

Re: cheap jewelry retouching

Hello. I really like the retouching you did and your courage to post on here. I'm a total novice at retouching jewelry and hope you can share the French tutorial with me. Best of luck!