Photographing Jewelry for Print and the Web

To set up this shoot, we contacted a local jeweler, explained that we wanted to make a lesson on how to photograph jewelry, and asked him to loan us a few rings for the shoot. He not only agreed, he came to the studio to watch because he couldn't believe that it was as easy to do as we described.

Once we were in the studio, we first mounted an Olympus C-4040 Zoom digital camera to a tripod and powered it up. We set the shooting mode to Manual so that we could control our depth of field. To ensure that you have the greatest depth of field and that the jewelry will be in sharp focus from front to back, set the camera to its smallest aperture setting. In this case, we set it to f/10 (for a more in depth look at Depth Of Field, check out the lesson entitled, "Controlling Depth Of Field in Product Shots").

Then, we set the White Balance to match the color temperature of the Tungsten lights, or 3200 degrees Kelvin (for a more in depth look at White Balance, check out the lesson entitled, "Using Digital White Balance Indoors").

Next, we set up a homemade shooting table and attached a roll of white seamless paper to it (For a look on how to create your own shooting table, check out the lesson entitled, "Building Your Own Light Table").

We then set up a two light Photoflex Starlite Medium Digital Kit 2 and positioned one of the lights on either side of the table. Finally, we cleaned and polished the rings and placed them on a small table near the set (figure 1).

First, we placed a group of three rings held by cloth finger displays on the set. When lighting jewelry, a general rule of thumb is to surround the pieces with broad, soft light sources to render even reflections all around. To demonstrate, we positioned the left Starlite Kit close to the rings at a 45 degree angle. Bringing the face of the soft box closer to a reflective object increases its area of reflection. It is therefore advantageous to bring the light source in as close as possible. We took a shot, and the LCD on the camera displayed the captured image to confirm we had the correct exposure (figures 2 & 3).

With just one light, the group shot had a little too much contrast, and the color from the stones and gold were slightly washed out. To improve the lighting, I moved the soft box slightly forward (toward the background) and brought in the other Starlite Kit to the same angle and took another shot (figures 4 & 5).

Notice how the tonality of the result is now more evenly balanced while still maintaining a sense of dimension, and how the colors of the stones and gold are much more apparent. The finger displays worked well for the group shot, but next we wanted to show how to shoot a single ring up close. Laying the ring flat would minimize our lighting control, so instead we decided to prop it up with what many photographers call "ghee". Not to be confused with clarified butter, ghee is a mixture of kneaded eraser and modeling clay. Mixing the two by hand allows you to create your own consistency between malleability and stickiness (figure 6).

Once the ring was in place, we zoomed all the way out on the camera and came in as close as we could before losing focus. We took a shot and as you can see from the crop, it wasn't very close (figure 7).

Fortunately, this Olympus camera is designed to fit a relatively inexpensive optional Macro Lens Attachment, which is exactly what we decided to use next. We attached the lens and brought the camera in closer to the ring (figures 8 & 9).

We then zoomed all the way out, focused on the stones of the ring and took a shot with the same camera settings. The frame is now filled with the images of the ring and even the texture of the platinum is present (figure 10).

We shot several rings that day that a jeweler could use to either post to their website or make prints for in-store sale specials. To demonstrate how easy it is to print up weekly or monthly "Sale" prints to more effectively market merchandise, we decided to produce a sample counter-card using Adobe Photoshop Elements and an inkjet printer.

We removed the SmartMedia card from the camera and transferred the images to the computer via the Olympus SmartMedia card reader (figures 11 & 12).

We opened up the image of the blue ring in Adobe Photoshop Elements, and created a new window to serve as our layout page that was 8.5x11" at 300ppi by selecting "New" from the File menu (figure 13).

We selected the Move tool from the Toolbox, and clicked and dragged the image of the ring into the new window (figure 14).

Next, we decided to add a variety of type to the new image. We set our foreground color to what we wanted the type to be, clicked on the image, and started typing. To set the type in its own layer, we simply pressed the Enter key. Thanks to the type menu bar that appeared when type was active, editing the font size, style and color was easy and very similar to most word processing applications (figure 15).

Once the layout was set, we chose File>Print. This brought up the Print dialog box where we could choose the number of copies we wanted to print, the resolution and the type of paper on which to print. To achieve maximum clarity in the ring, we set the resolution to its highest (2880dpi) and chose to print on Pictorico's Premium Glossy Photo Paper (figure 16).