Create a Quick and Easy White Background for Your Jewelry Photos with Photoshop

by Ky Feldkamp
(Ky Kampfeld Crystal Jewelry)

When it comes to presenting jewelry online, a background that's cluttered and personal can distract the online jewelry shopper from the beauty of the piece. Also, a lack luster background can lessen the perceived quality of the piece.

A clean and elegant approach is the solid white background, and with a few simple steps in Photoshop, it's a piece of cake.

The conundrum of photographing against a white background is that if your jewelry is properly exposed, and unless you have quite the advanced photography setup, your white piece of paper or fabric becomes gray.

If the background comes out white, then your jewelry will be horribly over exposed.

The solution is to take the photo of your jewelry so that the piece is properly exposed against a white backdrop, (which will look gray in the photo) and to then change the background to white in Photoshop.

When setting up your shot, it's best if you can suspend your jewelry at least a few inches in front of your background. This prevents the shadows that occur if your jewelry is laying against the background.

You can use a simple earring display or a thin clear fishing line to hang earrings on, which can be edited out later.

Editing Jewelry Photos
to Create a White Background

A really simple and effective method to creating a white background for your jewelry is to use an adjustment layer. Open your photo, then click on create a new adjustment layer, and select 'Levels' from the submenu.



Go to the Adjustments panel and drag the highlights Input Levels slider (the white triangle on the right) to the left until the gray background turns white. Don't worry that your jewelry now looks awful, you'll fix that in a minute.



Go to the Select menu, and click on 'Color Range'. Click your mouse on any part of the white background to select it. Adjust your selection with the Fuzziness slider until all the background is selected, but most of your jewelry is not (especially any details like the chain should not be selected), then click okay.





The picture looks pretty good now, but there may be some parts of your jewelry that was lightened that you didn't want lightened.

This is an easy fix using the brush tool. Make sure your brush color is set to black, and select a small soft edged brush. Paint directly over any part of the jewelry that was lightened unintentionally to restore it.

If you accidentally paint over some of the background (turning it gray), you can undo the stroke (ctrl-z on pc and command-z on a mac), or change the brush color to white, and paint over the background to restore it to white.



The final jewelry photo with white background:

Earring Photos:
Editing Out the Earring Stand

If you're editing an earring and need to erase the earring stand (a white or clear earring display works best for this), follow the steps above to change the background to white.





If there's still part of the stand showing, the fix is easy. Use a small to medium sized brush with a soft edge set to white, and simply paint over the visible parts of the stand.



If you're duplicating the earring to make a pair, make sure to create a merged layer, which is a flattened layer for you to copy from (ctrl-alt-shift-e on pc or command-option-shift-e on a mac).

Then make a selection around your earrings, copy, paste, and position to make the pair.



The final earring image without the earring stand:



Ky Feldkamp
Ky Kampfeld Crystal Jewelry