As I mentioned in the last blog, shooting jewelry on a black background for a website or a catalog can cause some issues with the lighting. The first photo has some nice old rings on a black background.
old rings photographed on a black background
Notice how black the bottom of the rings are? They are reflecting the black background so well they disappear into it.
Now here’s a solution, insert a white reflector to bounce light back into the front curves of the rings.
rings with a white reflector in place
But the white paper looks funny in the shot, so the simple answer there is to merge the two shots together in Photoshop, to get the black background with the properly-lit rings:
final composite ring photograph
Note, after resizing the images to the final used size, I always recheck the image for sharpness and color, which can change when going from a print-sized image to a web-sized image.
So here’s one way to achieve a well lit photograph of jewelry on a black background. But this is not the only solution. Stay tuned for more to come.
