Jewelry Photography 101 – Basic Photo Editing with Picasa2

Imagine having jewelry photographs so vivid, so well composed that anyone viewing them is just chomping at the bit to get their hands on your jewelry.

And then imagine in your mind’s eye how a lot of online jewelery photography looks. Kind of blueish maybe, a little dark, poorly cropped, a little fuzzy… Not so appealing, right?

Well, here’s the good news. With today’s software and technology, I think anyone can learn how to create serviceable, even beautiful jewelry photographs using an inexpensive digital camera and free or low-cost software. And luckily, you don’t have to be perfect.

This post isn’t about cameras or how to take good photographs, or composition. We’ll get to that another day.

Today, let’s talk about about the most basic of photo editing.

Basic Photo Editing

So let’s get started. I’m assuming you’ve already taken a few photos of your jewelry and uploaded them to your computer.

In this video I’m using some free software from Google called Picasa2. You can download this software here.

Don’t have time to watch a 2 minute video? Here’s a quick checklist you can use to critique your own photography.

Photography Bottom of the Barrel Basics Checklist

• Photos should be clear. If they’re not, sharpen them up.
• Your jewelry should fill the frame. If it doesn’t, crop it down.
• Your back ground should complement the jewelry, not distract from it.
• You should have multiple photos of each piece from different angles.
• Your photos should be bright and the color should be
• as true to life as possible.

Action checklist for editing your jewelry photography in Picasa2:

• Autocolor
• Autocontrast
• Crop
• Sharpen

More Picasa tips: This isn’t shown in the video, but you can also tweak and tune further by clicking on the tuning tab and fiddling with those controls too.

About the photography in this video:

Amanda Kavanaugh, one of my newsletter subscribers, has very kindly allowed me to use her as a guinea pig in this tutorial. You can check out her online shop here: Prinny’s Boutique

Thanks Amanda!

Any thoughts on this post? Join the conversation by commenting below.

Popularity: 6% [?]