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How to get rid of the imperfections of a diamond wedding ring...?

haring

Member
The question is simple: How to get rid of the imperfections of a diamond wedding ring...? As you see there are tiny cracks and spots on the diamond on the wedding ring. How can I get rid of them and make the ring look perfect?

 
S

Stoney

Guest
You want to work with a large image and zoom in so that you do not stress your wrists and arm. Later you can reduce the size by 50% so that any remaining small defects are not visible. Use the spot healing brush tool, healing brush tool, or the stamp tool.

Healing brush tools can be switched to by pressing the letter "j"

The clone stamp tool can be switched to by pressing the letter "s"

The spot healing brush tool is easy to use. You can vary the size of the brush by using the bracket keys "[" and "]". You can reduce the contribution of the brush by changing the "Opacity at the top of the screen. The spot healing brush uses the surrounding area to correct the blemish.

The healing brush requires you to pick an area to sample from by pressing the alt key and clicking. Then as you paint it samples from the region that you defined by pressing alt and clicking.

The stamp tool works similarly to the healing brush tool, but it does not use the current area when blending.

You can learn the basics by watching videos on Lynda.com. You can pay on a month per month basis. I have learned much more from the videos than I ever did with the books.

Also, you can learn some additional retouching skills for people by watching RetouchPro videos, but you must learn the basics first.
 

darr

Well-known member
Which tool would you use and how?
Photoshop tool?
Oh goodness it depends upon your style. I would zoom in at 100% and clean it up; my tools would vary between cloning, spot healing w/content aware and contrast adjustments.

This only applies if I am getting $ to do this. As a wedding photographer it would not be my job to make a brides ring look perfect; it would be my job to photographic it as it is. As a product photographer, I would tell the client they need to offer as many rings as possible so I could hand-pick the closest to perfection and then we would talk more about the result and their expectations.
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
I think this might be more of a challenge than it first appears. The "defects" that I can see are mostly pixel-level changes in luminance within the various tones of the distinct facets. Using a spot healing brush (as an example) in the tender values of the facets of a diamond will be tricky.

One approach might be to be more judicious with your sharpening techniques during the conversion. My suspicion is that the amount of sharpening required to achieve the knife-like edges of the facets is also causing the "gritty" nature of the tones inside the facets on the ring.

I use the Pixel Genius plug-in that provides a brush-able level of sharpening so it can be applied only where needed. You can achieve the same thing using masks in PS.

Of course this is just a guess from looking at your jpeg.

Good luck! I'd love to see your final result.

Tim
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Try this, it won't cure but might help: Copy the main layer, zoom in on the diamond at around 200-400%, run USM at around 20 - 30%, 50 pixel radius threshold 10-15 and adjust to see if you can make the diamond look "cleaner." If you can't get it with any settings, it didn't work and you're done. Now you should have a lot more brilliance but some of the imperfections will be much more prominent, but also perhaps easier to clean -- clean them, probably clone tool is best, again at 400%. The final result won't be perfect, but it may be good/better enough. Finish off by adding a layer mask, select the diamond with the wand, go to "refine edge" and adjust the mask size and feather edge to get as close to the edge of the diamond with a smooth transition as possible so the rest of the image isn't affected.
 

jsf

Active member
Jack, even if that doesn't fix this particular problem, I think that the approach you just suggested was valuable for others who sometimes have problem areas that resist fixes. I have found that at that 200-400% level sometimes just breaking up the lines is enough to make the imperfection not noticeable. Though I don't think it would work here. Thanks for the tip. Joe
 

dmeckert

New member
if it's luminance variation that's causing the imperfections, or even color (remove some or all of it in the afflicted area, using the sponge tool on the copied layer), you can use a 50% grey soft light layer and dodge/burn at the pixel level (1-10px brush as necessary depending on size of image, 10% opacity, 50% flow), just like retouchers do with faces.
 
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