[Jewelry making - Article 00735] - Re: [Orchid] Photographing Jewelry 101

[Wayne Emery]

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Hi Rita,

    If you place a little piece of an 18% gray card in an inconspicuous
    part of the photo, click CTRL-L to bring up "Levels" and click on
    the middle eye-dropper in the lower right part of the screen, you
    ARE using the gray card as a reference. 18% gray reflectance is the
    standard to which all light meters are calibrated for exposure, and
    using the eyedropper tool will make all parts of the image which ARE
    18% gray in the real world, appear as such in the photo. 

    However, and this is big, this is assuming that your original
    expossure was correct or very close. If it is not, all bets are off. 

    The same holds for using the white eyedroper on your back ground.
    The biggest problem I hear is people syaing "My background doesn't
    come out white!" And usually that's because it's really not white to
    begin with. Kodak glossy photo paper is as close to white as you can
    likely get. If you compare that to "white" cloth or typinfg paper,
    etc., you'll see those items are really a shade of gray, not white
    at all. 

    But, because they are the lightest thing in the scene, your brain
    plays a trick on you, and you think it's white. But it isn't, and
    you can't fool the camera, which renders that off-white background
    as off-white when it is all properly exposed. 

    If you depend on your auto light meter, well, it's trying to make
    the dominant tone middle gray, and that's not what you want if you
    have a white or black background. 

    When a scene is properly exposed, it means that all the tonal values
    from blackest black to whitest white are rendered correctly....and
    it's not easy. And I will GUARANTEE you that any camera used in auto
    mode with a white or black background is incapable of creating the
    proper exposure. It's impossible. This is why we must work in Manual
    Mode so that we can independently control the shutter speed and
    aperture to get the exposure correct. At THAT point, we can make
    maximum use of our post-processing software. 

    IOW, when the exposure is accurate, the eye-dropper tools work well.
    Otherwise, if you "force" our improperly exposed background to be
    white, you are overexposing the darker tonal values. I hear folks
    say that the eyedropper makes all the other tones and colors fall
    nto proper place. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

    This is all explained in a step-by-step manner in my CD "Jewelry
    Photography Made Easy". It really does get great reviews, but I
    can't reproduce thwe whole thing here. 

Wayne Emery

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