Jewelry Photography III - Pixel Power

I think that this will be the last time that I write about the photographic aspects of presenting jewelry unless I run into some thing major with the photos. But I did want to talk about sizing in the sense of number of pixels per side.

The photos for my jewelry store on-line are 457 x 457 pixels. Flickr recommends a 500 x 500 pixel size. Etsy says that 800 x 800 or 1000 x 1000 pixels would be best so as to have good definition. I asked on a forum how others managed this re-working over and over again of the same photo. MetalRiot had this to say: "I make one high resolution version of each image and the resize them down as I need to. Do you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements? There is a batch feature in those programs that will let you apply the same action to an entire folder of photos. So you could make them all 1000 x 1000 for etsy, and then run batches on them for the other sizes you need. That way you can do a large number at a time, and you can even walk away from the computer while Photoshop opens, resizes, and saves the new versions (into a new folder, so you still have the originals)."

So there it is. Do the curves - contrast and color correction - crop, size to 1000 x 1000 pixels and save as a RAW file. Down size as needed.






Here is the result of a little experiment I did. This is the very same photo of a set of earrings saved in the 4 different sizes. I know that I need new glasses but all of the photos seem to me to have a reasonably good definition. What is clearly visible is the change in the background and over-all color saturation as the pixels increase. Oops! Not much change visible at all. I assure you that the color change is very visible when I put the photos into a Word document and when I print them. I wanted to show you this but when I upload them to the blog the blogger program makes all of the photos 200 x 200 pixels (if I read the htm languare correctly).

I just checked the photos on Etsy and the large product photos seem to generally be 430 pixels per side, which is no where close to the recommended 800 or 1000. If this is true what is the sense of me worrying about sizing the originals larger? I hope that some kind reader can dissipate my confusion.

By the way, Bench Jewelers Conference & Expo announced the Passion Award jewelry competition.The entry form and photo submission is done online. The photos are to be jpeg or jpg format, no discussion about slides or digital origin and "the quality of the photo will NOT be taken in consideration while judging". They made it so easy that, even if each entry costs $35.00, they had my money for 2 entries within 30 minutes.