# wanting workflow advice for editing jewelry/cosmetics photographed in a lightbox



## spikeykun (Jan 12, 2011)

Hi all!  I'm fairly new to photoshop, but I've been put with our  design team at a trading company that deals in a very high volume of  cosmetics, jewelry, and accessories to take, edit, and put up photos of  our products for the web and our inventory system.  Our editing is done  using photoshop (recently upgraded to CS5), and photos are taken in a  lightbox (ortery photosimile 200 using a Canon Powershot A640), but we  are looking for ways to streamline our workflow so that we can crank out  finished pictures faster.  What plug-ins/Filters would work best for  jewelry and cosmetics for cleaning up dust/noise, fix up low quality  images (as we occasionally get photos from our vendors of varying  quality), or otherwise streamline our workflow?


Currently, my workflow goes a bit like this

1.)  Take a photo of the product using Canon Powershot A640 in Ortery  Photosimile 200 lightbox.  The photos usually have a very plain  background, with occasional noise and unwanted details from a dirty  background.

2.)  Export the picture as a high quality JPEG to my workstation to edit in photoshop

3.)  In Photoshop, I crop the image to take out excess border around the  product, autolevel or manually adjust the level to brighten and lighten  the product slightly, then extract the product using some combination  of the lasso, marquee, magic wand and pen tool.  I have some trouble  here with silver or light+semitransparent objects that have little  contrast with the background, but have a lot of fine details (chain  links, lots of tiny pearls, etc).  Nothing I can't get, but it is time  consuming as I have to go through and adjust my selection for each  problem area.  If the edges are jagged as it occasionally happens with  the wand tool, I smooth out my selection 1-3 pixels a few times.

4.) I copy my selection and paste it on to a new layer, then set the  other layer(s) off so that only my product is visible.  This modified  pictures is saved as a PSD.  A new 1024x1024 pixel template is created,  and this newly created product layer is pasted, resized and placed onto  the canvas however we want to show it, and a 1 pixel shadow drop added.   This refined PSD is saved and undergoes some batch resizing/framing for  the web/inventory system.  (Trying out Dr. Russell Brown's 1-2-3 script  to resize, rename, save into a desired directory and apply an action  script I made to apply a custom frame to the image)

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Since I am still pretty new to PS, I was hoping someone more experienced  might be able to suggest any tools, filters, plug-ins or some sort of  adjustment to my workflow that could make editing these photos quicker.   I believe AlienSkin, Topaz Labs, Niz, etc seem to have plug-ins that  allow us to clean up images, sharpen details, and improve low quality  scans, but am unsure what products stands out for ease of use,  efficiency, and efficacy for cosmetics and jewelry that we would  consider investing in them.  Any suggestions/comments would be very  helpful!

SpikeyKun


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