Take professional looking jewelry pictures at home

I've been working on building up a small jewelry business for a year now and I've been struggling with photographing my jewelry for almost as long.  I've photographed some pieces 3 times now and they're about to get a fourth because I've learned the secret to good jewelry photography: K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid), lol.  In this post I'm going to show you how to inexpensively take pictures of your jewelry at home that look like they were done in a professional studio.

First the materials:

• A really bright room (I have a large bay window in my den that I set my table up in front of.)
• A piece of vellum (you can find a 12x12 piece in the scrapbook section of Joann's, or a fine art store will usually have large sheets)
• A large rock (you'll want one with a fairly flat side to lay your jewelry across, also stick to a dark neutral color so it doesn't compete with your jewelry)
• A good camera (I know I put an emphasis on the inexpensive in this tutorial but you will want a nice camera that will give you high quality picures.  I use a  Fujifilm FinePix S5700 S700.)

The set up:

You want to pull the rock toward you on the vellum piece, those top corners are what tends to leak out the edges of the pictures.  Drape the jewelry piece over your rock.

 The camera settings:

If you have a higher end camera you probably have a bunch of custom settings that may seem overwhelming.  Sport, Portrait, Night, and Landscape are the basics, then my camera has settings for shooting at the Beach, in Snow, Fireworks, Flowers, Indoor Party, and several more.  Unfortunately it doesn't have a Jewelry setting (wouldn't that be convenient).  Luckily, if you're starting off in a nice well-lit room there's only 2 things you need to be concerned about on your camera: Macro and Flash

Let's start with Macro.  What's that?  When I found out about it I thought it was the magic Jewelry setting.  Macro is that little tulip button on your camera and it's what allows you to focus on things that are held really close to your camera's lenses.  Some camera's (like my Fujifilm) have 2 macro settings, a regular Macro and a Super-Macro for things less than 1cm from the lens.  I usually use the regular Macro unless I'm photographing earrings, then the Super-Macro allows me to fill the frame.

Now for Flash.  This is something that you really have to experiment with on your own to find out what works best with your jewelry.  I usually don't use flash, as it creates strong distracting shadows in my pictures and tends to bring out the colors in the rock more than the jewelry.  However, I know Chrissy from Earthegy uses flash in a well-lit room to bring out the colors in her gemstones and they come out beautifully.  Try both ways and decide what works best for you.

Taking pictures:

Now that you have the set up down, it's time for the fun part.  Take some pictures, adjust your flash setting, take more, move the rock around the vellum to find the best angle, take more pictures, re-drape your jewelry a different way, take more pictures.  In this digital age there's no harm in taking more pictures, give yourself a lot of choices when you get to the computer.  I started with 10 photos of this necklace, 3 I deleted because the shadows were too strong or there was a funny glare on the large bead.  Of the 7 remaining I chose this one as the one I liked best, but you can see the edge of the vellum at the top and there's a lot of empty space to the left of the necklace.

 

Photo editing:

I do very little editing with my photos now, there's some examples in the gallery below of some heavy edits I used to do but with this photo all I need is a simple crop.  If your picture program has Auto Correct I recommend experimenting with that, it may enhance your picture quality in a pleasing way.  Just don't go overboard with clicking it, to much enhancing could give your picture a fake look.

 

Gallery - the good, the bad, and the ugly:

The good:

This is my rainbow beadweave necklace.  There wasn't a lot of sun the day I photographed this so I took the picture on a white laminate counter under a large florescent light.  The board is a shelf from the wall of my basement and the glass is the lid from a jar candle.  Because the florescent light really washed out this picture I did a basic Auto Correct to bring out the colors.

Earthegy citrine, chrysophrase, jade, pyrite, and pearls bracelet draped over a stack of books.

Earthegy magnesite bracelet draped over a dark neutral rock.

Earthegy Amethyst with Garnet necklace on a monotone map.  I love how the necklace is placed in the negative spaces on the paper so it's not competing with the map design.

A pair of my earrings hanging in a tree.  No editing in this picture I just got very lucky with the beautiful focus, though I couldn't copy it when I tried taking a picture of a larger piece of jewelry.

The bad:

Well aside from my poor taste in beads, this photo was taken in direct sunlight so there's a very heavy and confusing shadow underneath it.  Also I took it on the boards of my deck hence the dark, distracting line.

This was my first attempt photographing on a rock, however this rock has so many colors it takes away from the jewelry.

 The ugly:

Talk about a crap-ton of editing.  The afghan in the picture is originally bright blue and white so before I sepia-ed the photo and painted the necklace back to it's original color this was overwhelming.  IMO it's still incredibly overwhelming just because of the texture of the yarn and it just doesn't have the elegant classy look that I want in my pictures.  Also, when I'm putting back color in the necklace the blue afghan comes through the clearer beads so all the jewelry tends to have a hint of blue in it that isn't really there.

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 Thank you Chrissy from Earthegy for allowing me to use your photos in my gallery.

For more Earthegy jewelry visit www.earthegy.com or find her on Twitter or Facebook.