Macro Photography on White Background - what's wrong with this photo

[Inna215]

I'm new to macro photography but have been reading a lot about it. I have two canon digital cameras - the old Powershot S100 and the somewhat new S80.

I am trying to shoot silver jewelry on a pure white background for a catalog and website. I have tried so many different camera settings and setups and no matter what I do I either get a grey background or washed out jewelry.

I have a light tent and two 150w lights on both sides of the tent. I also tried placing a 250w light underneath the tent to illuminate the background but that is not helping. I don't use the camera flash.

Please see the attached photo. This was shot in macro mode (Aperture Value = 2.8, Exposure +2) I had to set the White Balance to Tungsten; otherwise the whole photo had a yellow tint.

I anyone has any suggestions on how to take better photos on a white background, I would greately appreciate it.

[Christa]

I can't really help with lighting but does it have to be a white background? Black would show off the jewelry just as much.

[RexK_Cozumel]

I agree with christa on this one... I think that a black background would be better especially with silver jewelry, probabbly not too good for onyx or someother dark types of jewelry. But anyways if you insist on using a white background make sure that what you are using is truely white. I had this problem when I was taking some photos of food items for my menus. While the background I was using looked white it kept coming out grey in the photos. Anyways what you can do is set your white balance to a custom setting and snap a photo of a white card or netural grey. Check your camera's user manual for instructions on how to do that. Or you can just go through in posting processing and turn your grey background white.

[Nicole]

Christa makes a really good point, black would show off silver jewelry much better. The contrast with white isn't very much. But...

If you're having problems with your lights casting funny colours, get daylight or natural light bulbs. This should help some of the problems with the colours. And what about lighting the box from the top as well?

The thing is you'll probably have to do some post-processing on the background to make it pure white. With what you had, I could lighten the background by using photoshop and using the selective color and levels adjustment.



I'm not sure what a better solution is without photoshop though.

[NAMGI]

You might try hot glueing the jewelry to a piece of glass held away from the background and hang some strips of black paper in front of the jewelry to be reflected in the silver and give it form.