Visually appealing, high-quality photos, where every detail is easily visible, are crucial for successful eCommerce performance in the jewelry business. By ensuring each piece is captured and presented in the best possible manner, jewelry photo retouching has emerged as a reliable technique.
It helps you turn your raw images into high-end photos of your jewelry that draw customers’ attention and build trust among them. Investing in jewelry retouching can be the right choice for businesses to stay ahead of their competitors, but how? Let’s understand this below.
How Does Jewelry Retouching Affect Businesses?
1. Attracts Valuable Clients
With growing competition, if you are not focused on getting stunning and attractive product visuals, your product might lose its significance because the first thing a customer looks at is the product image. Raw, unpresentable, or unedited images can make potential buyers lose interest. Jewelry image retouching can, however, make your product look clearer and more attractive while also emphasizing subtle details of your jewelry that attract valuable customers.
2. Boost Sales and ROI
Most people who shop online usually decide to buy a product after viewing pictures of it. The brands that use premium and catchy images are most likely to attract and convert. Therefore, jewelers, business owners and resellers prefer photo editing because product images appear attractive, thereby enhancing sales and revenues.
3. Minimizes Product Returns
Nearly 14.5% of eCommerce shoppers ultimately return their purchases. A primary reason for this is the difference between the real product and its image. Raw images generally fail to represent the true color and contrast of the jewelry because of some unwanted things like dust, reflection, etc. Using jewelry photo retouching, you are more likely to get a realistic and authentic product image, which ultimately reduces the chances of the product return.
4. Strengthens Customer Trust
Raw product images don’t look as the final product sometimes. That is mainly due to dim light conditions, disorganized background, or any other factor. Jewelry photo retouching builds the confidence of customers. The businesses must make sure that images look as realistic and close to the original product as possible. Once they get high-quality and professional images of the product, it builds trust and loyalty.
5. Maximizes Advertising ROI
Businesses spend a large percentage of their budget on advertising to receive higher sales, wherein in 2024, total annual ad spending reached nearly US$1,088.00bn. To make the best out of advertisement campaigns, product images need to be the most outstanding. That is where jewelry photo retouching comes in. Displaying jewelry products at their best makes the overall effect of advertisement campaigns & maximizes ROI.
What Makes Jewelry Photo Editing Challenging?
Now that we know the importance of jewelry photo editing, the next important thing is to understand why it is so challenging to turn raw images into good-quality photos:
1. Glare and Reflections
Jewelry is quite reflective, especially those that contain metals and gemstones. The reflective surface may reflect lighting, causing glare, uneven brightness, or distracting highlights, giving the picture an unprofessional look.
2. Dust, Scratches, and Imperfections
Even the smallest dust or a slight scratch on the jewelry is easily noticed in macro photography. These flaws can spoil the overall look of a luxury piece.
3. Capturing the Right Colors
Photos of gemstones and metals often appear dull or wrongly tinted. Sometimes, getting the right colors is a big challenge.
4. Uneven Lighting and Unwanted Shadows
If the lighting is not adequate at the time of a photo shoot, that may create unwanted or too-jarring shadows and distracting glare that would hamper the general appeal of the jewelry.
Addressing the Challenges with Jewelry Photo Editing Techniques
The most crucial element of the jewelry industry is producing visually appealing and eye-catching photos. With the right techniques, you can ensure every product image is in its best version.
Below are a few jewelry retouching techniques to help businesses produce high-quality visuals:
1. White balance and color correction
One of the main concerns when it comes to jewelry retouching is keeping the product’s natural color. Customers may get dissatisfied if jewelry seems faded or is misrepresented due to even a small color variation.
Using color correction techniques, one can ensure that gemstones, metals, and other elements of the jewelry appear just like they do in real images. Likewise, adjusting the white balance makes sure that the colors are not absurdly warm or cool.
2. Removal or Replacement of Photo Background
The background of jewelry images may hamper visibility & clarity of the actual product. It may also not compliment the real product, mainly if it’s cluttered and inconsistent. An empty or colored background helps to create more attention around the jewelry. However, very reflective jewelry would make it hard to achieve a clean background.
Here, the retouching technique requires removal and replacement of background.
Using a pen tool is very simple and you could cut the jewelry out of the background easily to put on the plain or a solid color background.
For example, using a pen tool is very simple and you could cut the jewelry out of the background easily to put on the plain or a solid color background.
3. Shine Enhancement and Reflection Adjustment
Shine highlights the defining features of jewelry, especially metals and gemstones.By carefully taking care of reflections by enhancing subtle ones or reducing the strong ones, business owners can nicely convey the jewelry’s quality and design. This approach gives a refined and sophisticated look, making the pieces appear elegant and polished.
4. Jewelry Texture Enhancement
Intricate designs and tiny gemstones may not always be captured in the jewelry images perfectly. Customers prefer to view luxurious details with absolute clarity to feel confident in their purchase. Detail and texture enhancement techniques help emphasize the intricate features of jewelry. Any flaws or imperfections that create hindrances in these features are removed carefully, giving a brand-new look to the jewelry.
5. Realistic Shadow Creation
One of the key photo editing techniques to improve the jewelry’s natural appearance in pictures is to create realistic shadows. Shadows give your jewelry images depth, texture, and a realistic feel, giving them a 3D look.
6. Cropping and Composition Adjustment
This method entails adjusting the alignment and framing to present the jewelry photo in the most appealing and professional way. With this approach, the most important elements of the jewelry, such as a gemstone or intricate details, are identified and cropped to attract the viewer’s attention.
The techniques covered above are important to enhance the overall appearance of jewelry. This will help achieve business objectives. However, reaching such perfection is not easy; it requires time, specialized tools, skill, and expertise, all of which are challenging for an internal team to provide. At this point, outsourcing can turn out to be a significant substitute.
Why Should Jewelry Businesses Outsource Photo Retouching
There are multiple benefits associated with outsourcing jewelry photo retouching. Businesses should understand this as it can be a big strategic move. Here’s how.
1. Cost Efficient
Retouching a jewelry image may demand an investment in expensive tools and software. Proper training will also be needed along with additional time. However, when you outsource, the costs are pretty limited because you only pay for the services you select, which is the reason it makes an efficient and cost-effective substitute.
2. Qualified Team of Photo Editors
Outsourcing companies have a team of competent and skilled image retouchers who have a good knowledge and knack for jewelry photo editing. They have mastered the skill of enhancing images while maintaining the product’s authenticity.
3. Quicker Project Delivery Time
Service providers have a team who work round the clock and can easily handle large numbers of images efficiently, thereby ensuring quick and smooth delivery without sacrificing quality.
4. Round the Clock Support
Retouching may be a very complicated process because it demands the combination of different tools and techniques with human expertise. To handle these complexities, you get 24/7 expert assistance from skilled retouchers to manage the overall efficiency, which gives you a scope to concentrate on crucial business operations like advertising, sales, etc.
Conclusion
By now, you probably know how important high-quality images of jewelry are and how difficult this task is in terms of processing. Even with an in-house retouching team working exclusively, the process can be extremely time-consuming and expensive. Outsourcing Jewelry Photo Editing Services is a smart decision if you are eager to save your time and effort and cut expenses to ensure ideal jewelry photos. Therefore, choosing the right service provider will help you enhance your product visuals to their best version. This will not only help you gain more customers but also maintain a strong brand presence in the marketplace.