Unit 310 - workflow for Jewellery -to be continued.

Workflow for Jewellery shoot.

This is the 2nd part of my brief, to produce images to include in a catalogue of jewellery.

My first thought was to how to accomplish this, and where. I decided that the best place to do this would be in the college studio, as I do not have the full facilities at home.

I then visited the studio to work out how I was going to do achieve this, and decided to use the light table instead of a light cube. This would give me more latitude to photograph the jewellery. I had previously used a lighting cube to do a product shoot, but found that I could be more flexible without it.

I then decided how to light the jewellery. This would be using a variety of the studio lights, and once set I could reuse the set up with minor alterations, depending on the piece of jewellery.

My next step was to source the jewellery that I was going to photograph. I acquired several pieces of jewellery, and set about planning how I was to produce images for this.

I then booked a date for the studio. I then photographed a variety of items.
Below is an image of the set up I used.

The light table was set up and the lighting is as follows:-
Softbox reflecting light off the floor to the underside of the table --GM500R set to power level 1 and 1 tenth.
Softbox set at 45 degrees at the front -- GM500 set to power level 1
Snoot with honeycomb set at low to opposite side of softbox -- Esprit 500 set to power level 1/32nd.
The camera was both hand held and also for most of the shots mounted on a movable stand.

Adjustments were made mainly to the aperture on the the camera to achieve the correct exposure when imaging the different items of jewellery, whilst leaving the lighting generally as noted. There were occasions when I did adjust the lighting slightly, either changing the power level or by slight movements of the lighting.

Post production was done in the same manner as the Emma shoot, downloading to a seperate folder, editing and deleting unacceptable images, choosing a selection, then editing the final choice of images.

I have included also here an example of some post production work that I have done on one of my images of the cuff links. This would be typical in the case of jewellery photography ( apart from the picture clipping)as at times it is impossible to not show some lighting/feature that is not required int the image.

The first image is prior to the post production. It shows an obvious streak of light, and the photographer is shown to the left, as a pink line,and as a reflection, with some bright spots. the second image shows some adjustments made to to take out some unwanted reflections and a line of light. Please note that the image is zoomed in to over 200% of the the original.

Also shown below are some grab shots of my workflow to show how I get to my final print.

This shows my intial crop of the actual image. No point in altering the image if you are going to crop later.

This image shows the initial printing page for my Epson

 R220 printer at home. it shows the printer, page set up button and allows you to scale to fit media. it also allows you to adjust the colour management for the print.

this screen allows you to cahnge the quality and various other parameters, such as Best photo print eg 

Once you have pressed print then this progress screen appears. It also shows the ink levels, and should be checked each time to ensure you have enough ink prior to printing.

this is a sreen capture of another item.

See later blogs for images produced and comments.