pureglassbeads
30-03-2011, 10:08 AM
Hi
I can't remember which website I found this series of steps on but it works pretty well for me when taking pictures of my beads and jewellery. Hopefully they may be of use to some of you as well:
To take the picture:
1. I place my beads/jewellery on a small pile of white A4 paper (I use a pile around 20 sheets thick so the table does not show through).
2. I then use 2 x table top studio lights and place them either side of the paper pointing down.
3. I set my camera to use Aperture priority and set it to F22, set the white balance to Florescent and the metre mode to centre weighted.
4. The camera is mounted on a tripod and I snap away. I take several shots of each piece, from different angles.
Once the picture has been taken it will appear dark but this is where Photoshop does its magic.
In photoshop:
1. Open the image
2. If the background contains any table or other object other than the paper, crop the image so that the background only contains the paper.
3. Now, from the menu you need to select the Levels option. On my version this is found under Image > Adjustments > Levels
4. In the window that opens you will see three small eye dropper tools (Set Black, Gray and White). Click the 'Set white' eye dropper.
5. Now click somewhere on the image background that should be white.
6. This will make your image brighter and the background should be pretty much white.
The final stage will be to sharpen the images but before I do this I crop and resize my image. I normally make mine 600 pixels square for the website.
Once the image is the right size, select the Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask option from the menu.
In the window that pops up I use the following settings:
Amount 96%
Radius 1.4
Threshold 0
Thats it. You can see how this turns out by looking at the images on my website. Not all are 100% perfect but i'm pretty happy with the results.
I'm not to sure how this would work with clear beads and pearls but it works pretty well with colour beads.
I can't remember which website I found this series of steps on but it works pretty well for me when taking pictures of my beads and jewellery. Hopefully they may be of use to some of you as well:
To take the picture:
1. I place my beads/jewellery on a small pile of white A4 paper (I use a pile around 20 sheets thick so the table does not show through).
2. I then use 2 x table top studio lights and place them either side of the paper pointing down.
3. I set my camera to use Aperture priority and set it to F22, set the white balance to Florescent and the metre mode to centre weighted.
4. The camera is mounted on a tripod and I snap away. I take several shots of each piece, from different angles.
Once the picture has been taken it will appear dark but this is where Photoshop does its magic.
In photoshop:
1. Open the image
2. If the background contains any table or other object other than the paper, crop the image so that the background only contains the paper.
3. Now, from the menu you need to select the Levels option. On my version this is found under Image > Adjustments > Levels
4. In the window that opens you will see three small eye dropper tools (Set Black, Gray and White). Click the 'Set white' eye dropper.
5. Now click somewhere on the image background that should be white.
6. This will make your image brighter and the background should be pretty much white.
The final stage will be to sharpen the images but before I do this I crop and resize my image. I normally make mine 600 pixels square for the website.
Once the image is the right size, select the Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask option from the menu.
In the window that pops up I use the following settings:
Amount 96%
Radius 1.4
Threshold 0
Thats it. You can see how this turns out by looking at the images on my website. Not all are 100% perfect but i'm pretty happy with the results.
I'm not to sure how this would work with clear beads and pearls but it works pretty well with colour beads.