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Let's Get Started - Take The Bead Pictures!
This tutorial is for bead photos editing using Photoshop, for photo editing newbies only. ^__^ I won't cover the camera setting, because it's different for each beads, mostly based on it's color. Matte, darker colored beads are easier to capture than the light, pale or trasparent colors.

I am using Mr. Smiley's beautiful boro heart pendant from my private collection for this tutorial. Usually I would take several pictures for each bead. With the matte colored beads I usually got lucky and got some perfect pictures that I don't need to edit. Actually with this pendant, I got my perfect one, but let's pretend we don't have any, so we need to pick one that is close to the perfect one. What I want to see is the bead's exact look in person (or at least close to it), in its perfectly white bacground.

Let's edit it, shall we? Step 1:
Find the image by clicking: FILE - OPEN A box will pop up. On top you'll see LOOK IN, locate your image using the drop down menu.

Step 2:
We are tweaking the image's layer, click LAYER - NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER - LEVELS.

Step 3
A NEW LAYER pop up box opened. Click OK.

Step 4
A new pop up box will open. In the right bottom there are 3 eyedropper symbols. Click the right one, called: SET WHITE POINT, your mouse icon will change into an eyedropper icon, click once on the bead image background. The background will turn completely white, no more grey area.

The Result
If you're still not happy, or the background is not turning completely white, you can play with the histogram, by clicking and holding and dragging the black and white icon under the bar, while watching your image changes, until you are happy with the way it looks. I hope you find this tutorial useful, thank you for checking!

© beads by babe 2007