Jewelry Photography: Your Guide to Stunning Jewelry Photos

Jewelry photography is one of the trickiest genres of photography. The jewelry’s high price tags aren’t just heavy on the buyers’ pockets, but they also add a greater responsibility on the photographer to ensure that there’s no room for error when photographing them.

If not planned well, the shiny surfaces can be a pain to photograph. So, in this guide, we’ll be sharing a few simple techniques that will help you photograph beautiful glittering images of your jewelry.

Background and Props for Jewelry Photography

Before we go on to talk about all the camera gear and lighting techniques for jewelry photography, it’s important that we decide on what background we want to use, or whether or not to use any props.

If you’re photographing jewelry to enlist them in websites like Amazon, you might want to take the simplest route and use plain white or neutral grey backgrounds. Doing so allows you to present the product in a way that the customers have an undistracted view of the products.

For this, you can easily use white or grey paper sweeps as your image background. In case you have some white cloth at home somewhere, you can use that too.

But if you’re photographing jewelry more for advertising, a lifestyle shoot,  or maybe for your own purposes, you have greater freedom to work with backgrounds of different colors and textures.

In that case, you can get as creative as you want and even use props and accessories that complement the jewelry.

The props don’t have to be too fancy either. Rocks, pebbles, plants, flowers, mirrors, and wooden decorative for instance do the job well.

Camera Gear for Jewelry Photography

Thankfully, the cameras we use for jewelry photography don’t need to be anything special. You can even use your smartphone if you want but for detail-oriented work, we recommend that you get a hold of any basic camera.

Unless you need to make big prints of your jewelry photos, there’s no need to go for a high megapixel full-frame camera either. Even a 24MP APS-C camera can capture details that are more than enough for online usage and general-sized prints.

On the other hand, when it comes to choosing lenses, you might want to get a bit picky.

If you’re looking to get some serious close-up shot of the jewelry, a macro lens would be idle. Macro lenses also come in handy to capture all the beautiful details that are meticulously crafted in a piece of jewelry.

If you don’t want to take close-up or detailed shots, then work with lenses that have a focal length greater than 50mm. Even a telephoto lens in the range of 70-200mm would be okay. That’s because the level of distortion is quite low in that focal length range.

Some other accessories you’d want to have around for jewelry photography include:

• A tripod so that you can take your time composing your images and shoot sharp photos
• A light source (optional) to illuminate the jewelry
• Clean cotton gloves to handle the jewelry
  
• Black and white foam boards (optional) to block unwanted lights & reflections, and to fill in the shadows respectively

How to Take Jewelry Photos: A Step By Step Guide

1. Preparation and Lighting Setup

Before you start taking photos of jewelry, it is important that you first invest a good amount of time preparing the shot. This will ensure that you spend less time making corrections in post and put more time into making great photos.

When preparing for jewelry photography, it’s best to have your setup right beside a large window that acts as a large light source. If you’re using studio light, a good idea is to use a large modifier on it and place it at a forty-five-degree angle to the jewelry.

If the shadows are harsh, use the white foam boards to fill in the shadows and make them appear softer. On the contrary, if there’s unwanted light or reflections on the jewelry, use the black foam boards as stoppers to block them.

Here’s an insightful video you can watch to make the most out of natural light for any kind of product or food photography:

2. Style the Jewelry

As we highlighted earlier, styling may or may not be necessary based on the purpose of your shoot. If styling is necessary, take the time to do it. Besides using colorful and textured background, you can use the following ideas for the purpose.

• Use a marble slate or textured wood as the base or background
• Add reflections using black acrylic or glass
• Use silk or velvet fabric as a background to add a premium look to the image
  
• Stones, flowers, leaves, and wood can add so much aesthetic value to a jewelry photograph
  
• Use books and other fashion accessories to complement the jewelry you’re photographing

Whenever you need to move your jewelry around, be sure to wear cotton gloves. Otherwise, the fingerprints on the piece of jewelry can ruin the shot.

3. Jewelry Photography Camera Settings

Jewelry photographs need to have certain traits in order to be more “sellable”. That is why it is important that you pay attention to some of the camera settings.

Aperture

Use a higher f-value such as f/8, f/11, or even higher if necessary for detailed shots. This is even more important if you use a macro lens as they have a very shallow depth of field and blur out the jewelry quite easily.

You want to capture the intricacies in the designs of the jewelry and not blur them out. Don’t go too high with the f-value though as diffraction will kick in and cause the images to appear softer.

When using a high aperture, you could face a situation where the light is not sufficient. While this won’t be an issue when using flash, it can cause problems for natural light photographers.

You can overcome this challenge either by using a slower shutter speed or taking care of the exposure in post. Using Colorcinch, you can easily adjust the exposure of your photos.

Step 1: Upload your jewelry photo to Colorcinch.

Step 2: Navigate to Edit – Exposure and adjust the sliders to brighten the photo. While the Brightness option will brighten the overall photo, the Highlights and Shadows options control the brightness in the bright and dark portions of the image respectively.

You can use the Contrast option will add a bit of a punch to the image.

Here’s a before/after of how the image appears.

4. Retouch Your Jewelry Photos

When working with jewelry photos, it is always a good idea to retouch them using any photo editor. As we discussed earlier in this post, exposure and white balance are some aspects that you can correct. But that’s not where it ends.

You can do a whole lot of things you can try out like enhancing the details, adding reflections, and even adding some shadows to add depth to your images.

Most importantly, ensure that your photos appear consistent and that the pieces of jewelry are not obstructed by any of the other elements.

To Sum It Up

Jewelry photography demands a great deal of attention to details from the photographer. Since this is a very commercial genre of photography, you get no room for making mistakes. So, anything that you do must have a strong intention behind it.

Pay attention to the details, and present your photos in a way the potential customers see exactly what they’ll be getting.