Scanning jewelry can be an easy, fast way to get great photos of your work.
(You can see my complete tips on scanning jewelry if you’ve never done it before.)
Unfortunately, the more 3-dimensional a piece of jewelry is, the harder it is to get everything in focus – because scanners are set to focus precisely at the depth of the scanner glass, and no farther.
But even though scanning jewelry works best on flatter pieces, you still may be able to wind up with a good picture of your work.
For example, recently a jewelry artist asked me,
“Do you have any solutions for scanning jewelry that has a slightly raised stone? The stone is raised just enough to make the pendant blurry around the perimeter.”
This is a good example of a piece that’s not perfectly flat – so if you’re going to scan it, you may need to change your intention for the photo.
Sometimes in your photo editing program you can do some “sharpening” or other things (you’ll have to play around with your particular photo and image editing software to see what works best) that minimize the blurriness on the more distant parts of the piece of jewelry.
But if that fails, can you use the blurriness as an advantage?
You may be able to make it look like the more distant parts of the jewelry are purposely “romantically blurry” for effect.
Sometimes a gauzy cloth backdrop or romantically-blurry paper background can help you achieve this effect quite nicely.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve been trying to get a perfect white background on some of the pieces that I’m selling online via camera. While I’ve had some success here and there, I’ve always had a bit of a problem in perfecting my set-up (lightbox, camera settings, lights, etc).
In the interest of expediency, I’ve resorted to having some exotic-looking backgrounds instead. The results have been great, and feedback has been good.
However, I’m a bit curious with your scanning technique. You mention that this might not be a good idea with pieces that have more depth, but have you tried scanning pearls, specifically black pearls? I would think that the scanner light might wash away the nacre depth of the scanned piece — something that makes this a moot exercise, but I would be interested in the result nonetheless.
Hello,
I do jewelry appraisals and use a digital camera. I used to take pearls to a local camera store that had a very sophisticated scanner that did a great job on pearls. I find that my new Kodak scanner does a reasonable job on pearls. However, with the current digital cameras I find that they are more than adequate for photographing most jewelry.
Jim