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Here's how to use a digital camera and Adobe Photoshop to create high quality images of your beads, jewelry and artwork in your own studio.

With Photoshop CS2, a Hewlett Packard Photo Smart camera with 5.5 mega pixels and a Digital Concepts Portable Lighting Studio I am able to take photographs of artworks large and small use them in many different ways. I didn't start out to be a photographer, but in the course of my work I've learned a few things that really help.  

Here's what the product description says about the Digital Concepts PS-101 at Amazon.com :

The Digital Concepts PS-101 portable lighting studio is light weight and easy to setup. With built-in carrying case; includes 2 high-output lights with retractable legs, 2 colored backgrounds for contrasting light or dark objects, a mini tripod and nylon diffuser screen for balanced lighting portable lighting studio.

I like it because not only is it very portable, it is also effective in a lot of different situations. You don't have to use it only as shown--the Velcro edged squares can be used by themselves as hand held light diffusers, or the top can be left open. There are many possibilities. I use my own cloth or paper backdrops too, and I made a fabric covered foam board "easel" that can be used under the backdrop to get a better angle. Items can be discretely pinned to the board if needed.

Many times I use the automatic settings on the camera itself, but sometimes I override them. I like to have enough lighting from my setup that the flash in the camera doesn't have to come into play. 

Sometimes the flash is very useful, and sometimes it just makes for glare. This is particularly true with strongly reflective surfaces like highly polished metal, glass, crystals, and other shiny surfaces. Diffused light is always best. I also use a small OTT light to add "fill" light to the mix from the front or the top as needed.

I've found that the OTT light fits well on top of the the box shape that the portable studio assumes when set up. It is shown at right. The fabric walls and top unfold from the carrying case and velcro into place, and the lights that come with it shine through from the sides and the top. They are not lit in this image; only the OTT light is on. The glare was too much with all the lights on; because the ornaments were dipped in Varathane when they were made 25 years ago and are still very glossy. I made our Christmas ornaments out of bread dough back then because I hadn't discovered polymer clay yet. I had never used a computer back then either, and the cost of traditional film photography was prohibitively high. But even then I knew Varathane was a very useful gloss finish for use on more than just wood!

Sometimes you have to try various settings--some lights on, all lights on, lights close, lights farther away...there are many variables including the ambient light in the room, the items that are being photographed and the camera itself. Sometimes I raise the lights by putting them on top of books or boxes. While not high tech, it is very effective. Full spectrum light works best, whether provided by daylight or artificial bulbs. Using a tripod is also important with small items and high resolution.

The portable studio includes two lights and a tiny tripod. Its very cute, but I use my larger tripod that I already had most of the time. Another studio "must have" is a power strip or box extension cord. The lights have very short cords, and there are three of them in addition to the AC adapter for the camera. The adapter allows me to shoot for hours without changing batteries every five minutes. Using the camera's Live View function or the Macro focus uses a battery up in no time at all, but its not an issue with the adapter. 

I always start with the biggest possible file settings in order to capture a high resolution. The pictures start out HUGE and with a file name that is generated by the camera. When shooting pictures for print, I stay at the large file size with 300 pixels/inch resolution, but for web pages I reduce images to 150 or 72 pixels/inch, with most at the lower resolution. I always keep the original in its unchanged state, then crop it to remove excess areas and resize it as needed. Then, I use the command >Save As and rename the picture to indicate what it shows. Every time you save a .jpg or .gif file, it loses a little bit of its original file integrity, so having the original image intact is a great backup.

Here is a photo of Melanie West's miniature mask (it is about three inches tall). However, the original of this pic is a 23M file! The shot shown here is now reduced to a mere 1.94M, and it is still much larger than I want for the web.

	This version is the same pic reduced to 400 pixels across in size. This is a good size for use on the web in pages or on blogs. As you can see, the shot is very dark, and would seem unusable at first glance. It was shot on a white polar fleece backing, with three lights. You'd think it would be very bright.  The camera's auto-focus function chose the light levels and I don't like the way it looks---BUT it is in focus and I know what to do to fix it right up
	In Photoshop, use CTRL+A to Select All. On the Toolbar at the top go to Image>Adjustments>Levels OR use your keystroke command CTRL+L to open the levels dialog box. There are three eyedroppers at the lower right hand area, one for black, gray, and white. Click your cursor on it to choose the white eyedropper, then move your cursor to a white area on the image. In this case, I use a part of the white polar fleece background. Automatically the levels are adjusted to fit the computer's equations for what should be what if that part is white. Just this one command can make most photos far more usable. There is an excellent tutorial online from Dawn and Evan at You Are My Sunshine about making your own photo-dome light diffuser for small beads and items, and the second part of it is a Photoshop video tutorial where this Levels command is demonstrated. It is well worth watching.
	Although adjusting the Levels makes a tremendous difference all by itself, there's more cleanup that can be done.  Again , Select All. Then I used the command Image>Adjustment>Brightness/Contrast to open a dialogue box with sliders that allowed me to brighten the entire image just a bit more and reduce the contrast very slightly as well. Too much all at once makes it garish. Next I used the Magic Wand tool.  I clicked on the background white area towards the outside of the image. Then by holding the Shift key down and clicking again in the part of the background that had not been selected I added it to the selection. I continue to do this until all background areas are included. Then I again used the command Image>Adjustment>Brightness/Contrast >
	However NOW it is only working on the area that I have Selected using the Magic Wand tool. (the background). I raised the Brightness level more and lowered the Contrast as well. I don't want to remove all shadowing completely, because I like the depth it gives the image. Using the Magic Wand to select all the background areas has many useful functions beyond this. You can make all sorts of adjustments, change or remove the background completely. You can also use the toolbar command Select>Inverse and it changes the selection to everything that WAS NOT selected before. In this case, it would be the mask itself. Then I can make adjustments that do not affect the background.
	Another extremely useful set of tools are Dodge and Burn. Here I have used the Dodge tool to significantly lighten up the shadow areas around the mask and remove the yellowish cast somewhat. It is far more subtle than just erasing the shadows would be. Dodge takes away part of the image, making it LIGHTER. It is similar to the Eraser in that you can use it to get rid of smudges and spots but can be set to remove things very delicately. The opacity of how much it removes can be adjusted as can the size of the "brush" you are using to do the job. It can be used to highlight areas that are too dark without lightening the rest of the image. Burn works the same way in terms of its setting adjustments, but DARKENS where it touches.
These are five of the ten masks in this set made by Melanie West for the Internet Miniature Mask Swap of 2006. It takes time to learn the various tools and functions in Adobe Photoshop but it is worth the effort. Every time I learn more about a tool or find something that works well I am enhancing not only the photo I'm working on, but all the ones that I will be working on in future projects as well. Although its possible to poke around in the Help files and learn a great deal at your own pace, it is also VERY helpful to get a good book or two about programs or tools that you use.

send email to: Sarajane@polyclay.com