Your Jewelry Brand Needs Top Quality Product Photography
Selling Jewelry Online is all About Branding
Building a jewelry company that primarily sells online can be a challenge. It’s a competitive space to begin with and customers are generally looking for the best value for their money. A lot of times converting a new visitor boils down to earning your customers trust in the small amount of time you have them on your site. This is where a strong, cohesive brand can become your best tool to convert customers on your site, and you need to be thinking about product photography as an extension of your brand.
Your Product Photography is Part of Your Brand
You have a product that you’re proud of, a company name and logo that you love, a website that you invested in, and a marketing campaign that is bringing in traffic. What are your potential customers seeing once they are shopping on your site? Your customers have noticed everything you’ve invested so far, we know this because they made it to a product detail page (or PDP). Once there, are they seeing images that look like the left or the right? These specific images may not be on brand for you, but do highlight the differences in quality.
Laid down and shot quickly with an iPhone and basic lighting set up. Piece looks dark, stones have no detail, color is incorrect, and image is low resolution.
Styled and shot with a camera and lens that is well suited for jewelry, custom lit, focus stacked, and lightly retouched to clean up dust.
Jewelry is Hard to Photograph Well
A jewelry piece is often constructed of metal and precious or semi-precious stones, and those two components photograph very differently. Often times, to show off both metal and stone in a way that is true to life, you may need to composite multiple images together. In order to shoot the metal in a way that controls reflections, the stone can look washed out, losing detail, however when you achieve good color and detail in the stone, the metal often has distracting reflections and highlights that are lost. An experienced jewelry photographer not only knows how best to approach these two parts of shooting a piece of jewelry, they know how to build a set and process that will allow them do that consistently across multiple pieces and types of jewelry.
Post Production for Jewelry is Specialized
Retouching is a standard part of the process in quality product photography for jewelry. One significant reason for this is that metal colors often appear different in person than when they are photographed. There are a lot of things that can impact this, but in order for all of your gold, silver and rose gold pieces to match each other, you need to be adjusting color as part of the post production process. Another thing to consider is everything that shows up when you zoom in very close to the product for photography. No matter how hard you try, there will be dust and tiny hairs that you can barely see with the naked eye. Cleaning up dust off the metal and shooting surface should be a standard part of your jewelry retouching package.
Invest in Showing Off Your Hard Work
You’ve worked hard to design and develop your jewelry line and now we need to get potential customers to see what makes your collection stand apart. Hiring the right person to photograph your jewelry and highlight all that qualities that make it unique can make all the difference in not only your conversion rates, but in how your brand is perceived. If you are interested in discussing your collection with me, and potentially sending me a few pieces to do a test shoot, please click here to reach out.