How AI Is Transforming Jewelry Photo Retouching

Why do jewelry photos need professional retouching?

In the jewelry product photography and industry, visual presentation directly affects the value of jewelry. If a diamond necklace of great value appears dull or lacks detail in the photo, its market value may be directly halved.

Jewelry photo retouching is not only about beautifying the picture, but also the key process to restore the gem's light, metal texture and craft details.

As e-commerce platforms have increasingly higher requirements for image quality and faster speeds for new product launches, AI tools have helped to refine jewelry images, which can improve work efficiency by more than ten times while maintaining professional quality.

Solved: Challenges faced by traditional jewelry photography

The challenges have made high end jewelry retouching a specialized skill, with retouchers often spending hours to complete a single image.

• The reflection and reflection of the metal surface are difficult to control
• The facets of tiny gems need to be captured with precision
• Complex textures appear differently under different lighting conditions.

To solve these problems, you can refer to the following tips for jewelry photo retouching

🟣Metal Texture

Preserve gradient sheen and weightiness, avoiding excessive retouching that diminishes heft or insufficient editing that appears cheap. Accurately reproduce brushed, polished, and other craft textures while maintaining natural highlight transitions.

🟢Gemstone Optical Effects

Reconstruct faceted reflections, enhance fire and color expression, and balance translucency with depth to compensate for optical properties lost in standard photography.

🟡Craftsmanship Details

Enhance millimeter-level details like prongs, chain links, and hallmarks without introducing noise, ensuring natural appearance when magnified.

🟠Background Processing

Professional still-life platforms are common in jewelry photography but still produce reflections and shadows. A pure, uncluttered background is essential for e-commerce platforms. Tools like UltraPic's one-click reflection and background removal save time.

How to retouch jewelry product photos in Photoshop

Photoshop, as a classic image editing tool, also provides different methods to retouch jewelry photos. These methods are roughly divided into global adjustments that affect the entire image and local brush-based editing for precise correction. If you are used to the Photoshop system, you can choose according to your specific needs.

Steps	Tool	Purpose
1. Basic Cleaning	Spot Healing Brush Tool	Remove dust, minor scratches, and blemishes (e.g., on pearls).
2. Shape Duplication	Rectangular Marquee Tool + Copy/Paste	Duplicate a better-looking earring to create a perfect pair when one photographs better.
3. Creating Gradient Shine	Smudge Tool	Soften and blend harsh highlights on metals or gems to create a natural, gradient shine.
4. Local Repair	Clone Stamp Tool	Sample a good area (e.g., a sparkling gem) and paint over a problematic area (e.g., a dull gem) to fix it.
5. Overall Toning	Brightness/Contrast	Increasing contrast typically makes colors richer and the product pop; use brightness sparingly to avoid losing details.
6. Local Brightening	Dodge Tool	Selectively lighten specific areas to enhance highlights and definition.
7. Local Darkening	Burn Tool	Selectively darken specific areas to add shadows, depth, and dimensionality.
8. Color Changing	Hue/Saturation	Change the color of specific product parts, such as altering gemstone or metal tones.

✨ Key tips & notes of using Photoshop for high end jewelry retouching

Brush Tools: For brush-based tools (like Healing, Smudge, Dodge/Burn), set an appropriate Brush Size and Hardness (often 40-50% for natural edges) in the top options bar.

Workflow: A good retouching sequence often follows "global first, local later." Start with adjustments like Brightness/Contrast, then proceed to detailed brush work.

However, Photoshop as a professional tool also has obvious limitations:

• Its steep learning curve requires users to invest a lot of time in systematic learning;
• Manual operation is tedious and time-consuming, and it is difficult to deal with complex details (such as hair and even skin tone);
• The high subscription costs and hardware requirements also constitute a threshold;
• The quality of the results is highly dependent on the operator's skills.

These limitations are particularly prominent in e-commerce, social media and other scenarios that pursue efficiency, and have also spawned easier-to-use and more efficient AI photo retouching tools.

UltraPic: Using AI retouching jewelry photos at ease

UltraPic is an AI-based online photo retouching tool which aims to improve the quality of product photos and reach the professional level results.

The editing tool simplifies complex retouching processes into just a few clicks. Simply put, UltraPic automates the time-consuming steps of jewelry photo retouching, freeing up time for detailed creative work in Photoshop where needed.

How to retouch jewelry photos step by step with UltraPic

Make sure the product is photographed against a clean, evenly lit background, which is a prerequisite for AI to accurately identify the subject.

Step 1.Click Photo Retouching and upload a jewelry photo.

Step 2. UltraPic includes two modes: AI Retouching and Studio Retouching.

✨ AI Retouching: automatically optimize light and color; it is suitable for improving the texture of ordinary photos with one click, and can be quickly used for social media and e-commerce list images.
✨ Studio Retouching: intelligently analyzes and removes low-frequency defects, retains high-frequency details, and strictly retains the original shape, light and shadow, and texture. Suitable for high-quality jewelry original images taken by professionals, which have a good light and shadow foundation.

For example, select the AI Retouching mode, set the "Retouching Intensity" (default value: high) and select the "Output Image Size".

Step3. Click "Start Retouching" and wait for the image to be generated. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can adjust the settings and regenerate.

Step 4. Select the image you want and click Download.

Photoshop vs. UltraPic: Choosing a jewelry photo retouching tool

Which is better, Photoshop or UltraPic AI photo retouching? The best choice depends on your specific needs in jewelry photo retouching:

If your work requires pixel-level creative compositing, detailed digital art, or extremely precise control over every highlight and shadow in high-end editing or advertising campaigns, stick with Photoshop.

If your goal is to improve efficiency, you can use AI tools like UltraPic to quickly prepare a large number of clean, consistent, and visually appealing product images for use on e-commerce platforms like Shopify or Amazon, while minimizing manual operations.

Conclusion

For professional creation that pursues ultimate creativity and pixel-level control, Adobe Photoshop is still the undisputed industry standard. However, for e-commerce sellers and photographers who need to process a large number of product images and pursue efficiency and consistency, AI image retouching tools such as UltraPic are more suitable for basic work automation. Successful jewelry photo retouching no longer means spending hours manually working in complex software.