I’ve taken thousands of pictures of jewelry. If you have perfect lighting (I never do), and a good camera that will take clear close-up shots, you can get a pretty good picture every time.

But what do you do if the light outside is *too* bright, and the light inside isn’t bright enough? This is a problem I face constantly in photographing my jewelry.

Luckily, using a few very easy steps, I can (mostly) fix my lighting problems using Picasa – in less than a minute!

Here’s an example of a photo I took, using my best possible indoor lighting, but late enough in the day that I didn’t have the benefit of some sunlight coming through the window.

Earring Photo - before retouching

Notice the blue background? That’s actually a piece of white felt. Easy fix: click the neutral color picker, under the “tuning” menu, then click anywhere on the blue background – tada! Light gray:

Earring Photo: blue cast fixed

But remember, I said the background was actually white. The light was too dim, so even after fixing the blue cast, it looks dark. Easy fix #2: under “basic fixes” slide the “fill light” slider toward the right until the colors in the photo start to resemble the actual colors. Results:

Earring Photo: dim lighting fixed

Then if I want to fine-tune my photo more, I might use the sharpen feature, or play with the contrast and colors a bit, and I might even open it in Gimp if I need more control – but I nearly always take the few seconds in Picasa to fix the lighting, since it’s so easy and really works.

(As a side note – these earrings are available in my etsy shop)