Take Photos of your Wire Jewelry using a Lightbox - Part 2

by Mike Ault

In Part 1 we demonstrated how you, as a wire jewelry maker can make a Lightbox for photographing your pieces for displaying on the Internet. Part 2 is about how to use it.

Adjust your camera's white balance for accurate colors.

Use the incandescent/2800-3500K setting with 500W halogen work lights.

Set aperture to f/11 for depth of field; tweak exposure for true whites without blowing out silver/gold highlights.

Mike Ault's Take Photos of your Wire Jewelry using a Lightbox - Part 2 - , General Education, Design, Tools, Selling, , Arrowhead Pendant

Many editing programs adjust levels; Photoshop 5.5 (PS) excels at this.

In PS, remove dust, clone lines/shadows, sharpen, and tweak levels.

Point-and-shoot cameras avoid dust with clean lenses; DSLRs need sensor cleaning or PS fixes after lens swaps.

Typical PS workflow follows a structured sequence.

1. Rotate (I like portrait, unfortunately the default in most cameras is landscape)

2. Crop (if needed)

3. Resize to standard size (if needed)

4. Adjust Levels

5. Clone out dust and unwanted lines/shadows

6. Show grid (if needed)

7. Free Transform(CTL-t) -rotate (to get it aligned up and down) (if needed)

8. Hide grid (if needed)

9. Clone out transform artifacts (if needed)

10. Adjust brightness/contrast

11. Adjust sharpness with Unsharp Mask(I use Amount 100%, radius 5.0 pixels, threshold of 9, adjust amount up and down to get the level of sharpness you desire)

12. Save under different name (do not over-write the original!)

13. Save for web appending size to name, in save for web you can adjust the size of file at a specific pixel dimension set (1024×682 for example) by adjusting the Quality setting.

The best way I have found to get your background white (if that is the color it is!) is to bring up the manual level adjustment and follow these steps:

Levels Adjustment Steps in Photoshop:

Select whitest white with shift-click; slide left slider right

image turns nearly black.

Grab right (white) dropper.

Click whitest white; whites restore properly.

(Optional if image looks good) Pick blackest black; slide right slider left.

Use left (black) dropper on blackest black and click-blacks set correctly.

If step five messes up your picture use a CTL-z to get back to the previous step and try again.

Practice with camera settings and in Photoshop (or your editor) until you feel comfortable.

I found using a tripod really helps keep the picture in focus and helps with camera shake.

Three wooden TV trays work great to hold the light box and the two work lights.

Once you are done, simply disassemble the light box and stow it in the back of a closet until you need it again.