Anyone who has attempted jewellery photography can tell you the difficulty of showcasing such intricate pieces in their best light. However, necklaces and rings are very popular for engagement and wedding gifts which can be showcased in wedding photography. As a result, businesses want their jewellery to have the best photography possible. This post will share helpful techniques for taking jewellery photos, making the process a lot easier.

Every piece of jewellery come with their challenges in jewellery photography. Jewellery are small products, which can be difficult to position when shooting. However, they are detailed, which means creative lighting to bring out the ideal reflection, texture and colour of the design. Creative lighting is essential as the most beautiful jewellery comes from fine and expensive materials. Jewellery pieces can be extremely shiny or transparent. As a result, care must be taken and understanding how to best reflect the brilliance of these materials is needed.

PLANNING

When working on your preparation before shooting, consider the product and what would help to emphasise it more. You never want the jewellery to become lost in the background. Your background should use colours and textures which complement the jewellery instead of colours and props that may overpower it.

When taking jewellery photography shots, it’s also essential to bring up an important but easily forgotten bit of housekeeping; clean your jewellery! Cleaning jewellery can help save time during the post-editing, as you won’t have to spend time removing specs of dust or fingerprints.

JEWELLERY PHOTOGRAPHY SETUP

In jewellery photography, take your time to experiment with your photography. Reposition the lighting – Adjust the positioning of the lights to see what effect this would have on the final images. Adjusting your lighting setup could help to make the jewellery shine.

Rings can seem tricky and probably one of the most challenging items to shoot. The top tip I can give for anyone having difficulties when shooting a ring is lighting. Try to use four or five lights around the ring; this can help to reduce the amount of reflection when shooting the shiny ring. . You can create incredible images by analysing the jewellery correctly and setting out the best environment to shoot it in.

SHOOTING JEWELLERY

Once the lights are up, the next step would be to solve the depth of field. Again, setting a smaller aperture can increase DOF. But, setting a bigger aperture causes lens diffraction into the photo resulting in some fuzziness in your photos.

A technique that can help to overcome this issue is called focus stacking. Focus stacking is when you take a series of images at different focus points for focus stacking. Then, you blend all the images into one to get a final image that is detailed throughout.

For jewellery photography, we usually use a full-frame camera with a 105mm macro lens (that’s equivalent to about 150mm on a crop sensor). 

It’s always recommended to put your camera on a tripod to prevent camera shake. Ensure sure that your lights remain in the correct position and, if you focus, stack your images, keep them aligned.

RETOUCHING YOUR SHOTS

When editing images, the stacked shots will be the most time consuming to edit. However, the process is fairly simple to complete in Photoshop.

All the jewellery images will require cleaning up as expected. Adjustments can be anything from colour enhancement when the lighting doesn’t ultimately reach the levels required to removing dust from images.

Hopefully, the steps I’ve gone through with you in this post will help you along your way with taking some brilliant jewellery product photography images.

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