[Jewelry making - Article 00836] - Re: [Orchid] Photographing Jewelry 101

[Alberic]

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HI Helen:

    I use Lightroom as well, and I've found it's saved my bacon more
    than once. Finally, some way to *find* all those images I've taken
    over the years. 

    If I want to find all my images of casting flasks (for a lecture) I
    just search for "flask". (This only works if you go to the trouble of
    keywording all your images. But once you've done it, that's it.
    You're done for good.) Get in the habit of doing generic keywording
    during import, it'll save much pain and trouble. 

    Meanwhile, what's going on with Lightroom is that it's reading the
    generic camera data, and that's what you see initially. You're
    shooting in RAW, right? 

    So it's taking the raw image data, showing that for a second while
    it sorts out all the various factors that the camera tells it were
    applied, and then applying all of the settings the camera said
    should have been used. 

    If you're getting 'dead' images after the correction data has been
    applied, clearly, the camera has taken it into its little head to be
    wrong about something. Not horribly surprising. Jewelry's a pretty
    oddball thing to be shooting. 

    My first candidate for a wrong setting is your white balance. If
    you're shooting in RAW (and with a D40, you should be), the camera
    records the setting it thinks *should* give the right white balance
    for the image. It's frequently wrong. The joy of RAW is that you can
    correct for it easily, with no loss of quality. 

    (Until you know enough to know how (and when/why) to set a custom
    white balance, leave the camera set in auto-white balance. That'll
    get you close, most of the time.) For serious work, take a shot of
    the item with a greycard in the frame, and then a 'real' shot with
    it out. Open the shot with the card in lightroom's develop module
    (press "D") and under the 'basic' tab over on the right, the very
    first thing is the white balance setup. (says 'wb'.) 

    There's an eyedropper on the left. Click on the eyedropper, and then
    click in the middle of the greycard somewhere. Find a spot with no
    highlights or oddball colored shadows. That'll pull the image back
    into a neutral color range, so your colors should at least be
    accurate. They may not be bright enough to suit you, but they'll be
    right. Go back out to the grid view (press 'g') and control click on
    the image you just fixed. A popup menu should appear. Under 'develop
    settings', near the top of the sub-popup that appears, is a command
    for 'copy settings'. Select that. A whole new menu will appear,
    allowing you to decide just exactly which settings you wish to copy.
    At this point, just copy the white balance. (the box is top left.)
    hit OK, and everything will disappear, leaving you back in the grid
    view. Select the 'real image' (and anything else you shot under the
    >exact< same lighting conditions), and then control click, and
    select 'develop settings' and highlight 'paste settings'. That'll
    paste your white balance settings into all those other images, and
    pull them all back to neutral color. Again, the exposure may or may
    not be right, but at least the white balance will be good. Going
    forward, buy a grey card, and use it religiously at the beginning of
    every serious shoot. If you have old images that don't have the a
    grey card, you can pull the same stunt by finding something in the
    image that *should* be a neutral grey, and clicking on that with the
    eyedropper. Keep in mind that if you guess wrong, you'll be tweaking
    your colors off into never-never land, as lightroom forces the whole
    image to act as though whatever you clicked was neutral grey. 

    The next sliders under the temp & tint sliders for the white balance
    are the exposure/recovery/fill light/black sliders for exposure
    adjustment. Below them are sliders for brightness and contrast. Feel
    free to fiddle with those to your heart's content. The nice thing
    about RAW and lightroom is that unless you go out of your way to
    create a problem, the edits you make are non-destructive. You can
    always go back and fix them without degrading your image. This is not
    always the case with photoshop itself.. 

    I suppose I should also clarify what I mean by neutral grey. Grey
    cards are two things: (A) they're 18% reflective, so they're a very
    particular balance point, but more importantly (B) they're a
    chromatically neutral grey. That's the part that matters to
    lightroom. It doesn't care that the greycard should expose to 50%
    lightness, it cares (a lot) that it expose to the same exact
    percentages of red, blue and green in the image data. So if the
    incoming data says that the card is 45,56,72 (percent Red, Blue &
    Green, respectively) it knows that if you hit the eyedropper on that
    area, it needs to tweak the image data back so that that area reads
    56,56,56. (or whatever value) The point being that it forces them to
    be the same value, so that the targeted area becomes chromatically
    neutral. All other colors in the image are tweaked accordingly, but
    it doesn't really care about using the grey card for exposure, just
    color balance. There are other things (like Macbeth cards) that are
    better for evaluating exposure and tonal range, but that's a very
    deep rabbit hole indeed. For now, for basic work, a grey card is the
    first step. 

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Brian Meek.

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