I just wanted to share some tips I’ve learned recently on vintage / handmade / jewelry & Etsy product photography.
#1 BACKGROUND
Choose WHITE! Seriously, this is the cleanest most professional way to go. Go get a poster board (white), lay it where there’s good light, and start shooting.
#2 COLOR
But the photo came out blue, yellow, etc…. Not to fear. It’s not a bad photo! Here’s what you do. You take Microsoft Photo Editor, which is usually on most PCs. You go in, you click Photo, you click Color. Then you click “Enhance Color” on the top right. A little cross-hairs looking circle will pop up and the instructions will say “Click on a part of the photo that should be white”. Did your white poster board turn out blue or yellow because of the light? Just click on the poster board background that SHOULD be white….and wait for your jaw to drop. It’s like an instant fix.
#3 DETAILS
Details are so hard to get! No, not really. In the same program, go to Photo, Brightness and Contrast. Unless you happened to photograph at night, you generally will NEVER need to use that top bar that say brightness. If you want the background, etc to look brighter and the photo’s a bit dark (and step 2 didn’t fix the brightness), then go to the bottom bar that says midtones only. Slide it up until it looks right. Details not showing up? Move up the contrast bar little bit by little bit until those details pop!
#4 MORE COLOR ISSUES
Generally step 2 will fix ALL color problems. Seriously. But if it doesn’t, here are some more tips.
If your photo is too blue: Go to the color bar in the middle, slide the little bar down to blue, then go to amount on top and slide it down. Then go to the bottom bar named saturation and slide it up.
If your photo is too yellow: Move that center bar up to yellow on the rainbow scheme there, and do the same thing you’d do for blue.
You can do this for any color.
If the colors are ok, there’s not too much blue, pink or yellow, then just go down to saturation and move it up a bit to make the greens greener, the reds redder, etc. Makes a more vibrant photo!
#5 CROP
DO NOT waste your time trying to put the lens of the camera right up against the item to get a good picture. It doesn’t work, it turns out blurry every time, and it makes you have to buy a new camera because you probably threw it across the room after about four items. Take your photo so that there’s a good amount of space (white) around the entire item. just center the item. Then crop it. The resolution will stay, and you can zoom right in to whatever artistic or dead center image you want. =)
#6 ANGLES
Please don’t just shoot it straight on. Do you ever see models standing with their hands to their sides looking straight at a camera? No! Because it’s unflattering and boring. Don’t do that to your jewelry! Take it from the side, tilt the camera a bit so that when you look at the photo straight it looks like it’s sitting on a slanted surface. Take pictures from ALL angles. Ask yourself this…if I were looking at this in a store, how would I turn this item so I could see everything about it. Take your 5 images based on that and make the most artistic and beautiful one the front photo.
Hope this helped someone out there! =) let me know if you have any other questions about Microsoft Photo Editor. When I started using it, it took me 20 minutes to edit a photo. Now I can edit even the worst photo in under a minute. =)
OH and you can resize your photos using this program, too! Photo, Resize and then under the preset sizes use “web, large”. It’s perfect size for Etsy and will zoom well, too. =)
Generally you want to resize to 640×480.
Have a great day!
