THE BEADING GEM'S JOURNAL |  |
| Reflect and Lighten Your Jewelry Pictures the Easy Way Posted: 18 Jun 2011 04:00 AM PDT  Part 2 of 3 My friend Margaret has a stressful day job. Her method of relaxing, making jewelry, rapidly became an addiction. Sound familiar? Margaret opened her Etsy store called SimplyAdorned4U recently and asked me for feedback. She was concerned about her photos and thought some were on the dark side and did have to lighten some of them. But on others, the lighting was just perfect. It pays to experiment with your camera settings the way Margaret has been doing. The picture below is a raw picture file with no editing. Her Fuji EXR camera does extremely well with low light conditions - there is a setting called pro-low lighting on her camera. I'm suitably impressed.  Overall I thought she did a great job considering this is her first effort. Some of her compositions were inspirational! They worked very well for her aesthetic styled jewelry.  Many photographers use slick surfaces to get the reflection. Here's Margaret's $2 tip - a white tray from a local dollar store! Her reflective pictures turned out great as you can see above and below.  White backgrounds are tough though. They often make the pictures too bluish because the lightness forces the camera to compensate by decreasing the exposure time. So you really have to add more light on the subject either with simple home made reflectors (see tutorial link below) or use lamps. It can be done! Another way to lighten the pictures is to use a photo-editing software like many artisans do. Check your camera CD or computer to see if you have one already. Photoshop Elements (the stripped down and cheaper version of the full Photoshop) is another option. The free GIMP program might also be of use to some of you. Margaret kindly sent me this before editing picture of one of her sets. It's on the dark side and didn't do the sparkling crystals any justice.  So use the software to brighten the picture. In this example using Microsoft Picture Manager, I just moved the brightness slider to the right.  The picture now looks lighter but a bit washed out:  So remember to adjust the contrast as well! What it did was brought back the darker purple hues resulting in a professional and clean look.  
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