4 Steps To Clean Jewelry Holding Wax

TThis tutorial show you how to clean jewelry holding wax on the ring and background.Wax can be a useful hand when it comes to standing up small pieces of jewelry. Just place a tiny little bit on the bottom of the item you are working with. This is a great way to stand up rings or tall focal beads too.
But if the wax is too big to distract attention from the jewelry and cover the jewelry elements . it will be a big problem to photographer and jewelers. Follow our 4 steps to cremove the holding wax, it become easy and fast.
Tips of clean jewelry holding wax
Before start retouch the wax or other problem for a jewelry photo, It is good idea to add an empty layer above the background, so you can keep all the retouching on a separate layer.
A special type of layer, called a Smart Object, contains one or more layers of content. You can transform (scale, skew, or reshape) a Smart Object without directly editing image pixels. Or, you can edit the Smart Object as a separate image even after placing it in a Photoshop image.
Smart Objects can also contain smart filter effects, which allow you to apply filters non-destructively to images so that you can later tweak or remove the filter effect.
- We highly recommend use pen tool for retouch jewelry photo instead of other selection tool. Pen tool can correctly define the outline the jewelry or the area you want to retouch.
Magic Wand Tool vs Pen Tool
Magic Wand
This tool automatically makes selection over a photograph and converts it into a path. Other changes can be made with color modification and background elimination. It’s very easy and the fastest way of making paths. An automated tool or, a magic path selection is made by a Photoshop algorithm, as a result it hardly creates an accurate path.
Learn about how to use Magic Wand Tool
Pen Tool
Photoshop Pen Tool is a crucial instrument for clipping path. It is a form of manual tool and an absolute hand made tool. It demands an expert hand and high skills. A manual clipping path specialist picks the Pen Tool from the sidebar and straightly draws the paths just all the way through the border of the image. It doesn’t miss a single pixel and comprehensively goes through the edge of the object. Since It needs the highest state of expertise.


Step 1: use the pen tool to clipping path for ring

Use the pen tool to define the outline of the bottom of the ring, the key is when drawing the path for the parts with the wax, you should restore the ring’s original shape and draw a curve path.
Some tips of using pen tool to make slipping. Select the Pen tool using the shortcut P. To make a selection, click two points to create a line between them, and drag a point to create a curved line. Use Alt/opt-drag your lines to change them. Ctrl/right-click your path in the Paths tab on the right, and then choose Fill Path to create a shape from it.
Step 2: convert the path to selection
When drawing path was complete, renamed the path as ‘ring bottom’, then convert the path to selection, To keep the edges of the retouching area soft so that they blend together smoothly. Set a low Feather Radius of between 1 or 2 pixels when change path to selection.
Photoshop refers to softening the edges of a selection as “feathering” the selection, and there are plenty of times when we need to feather our selection edges since not everything we need to select has edges that are sharp and clearly defined.
We may be trying to select an object that’s slightly out of focus in an image, causing its edges to appear soft and blurred, or we may be creating a vignette effect where our selection needs to transition smoothly and gradually into the surrounding background color..
Step 3: Using Clone Stamp tool

At first we retouch the wax on the ring’ bottom, Select clone stamp tool and make the opacity set to 80%, Making sure the sample option was set to ‘all layers’. Hold down alt (Option on Mac) and clicked to copy the sample point from the area without max, Then brush over the area with max, When brushing the ring bottom, You need carefully to keep the detail of the edge carefully.
With the Clone Stamp tool, you can use an empty layer to keep your retouching separate from the main image.Click the Add New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers panel.With the new layer active, click the lock position button at the top of the Layers panel to keep the new layer aligned with the Background layer.
In the Options bar for the Clone Stamp tool, set the Sample menu to Current & Below to copy detail from the underlying layer and place it on the new layer.
Step 4: Clean the wax on the background

After removing the wax on the ring. Start to remove the wax on the background, Hold down Ctrl + Shift + I (Cmd + Shift + I on Mac) to Inverse the selection, Clicked to copy the sample point from the area without max to brush over the max. A good idea is setting the stamp’s blend mode as Darken when you retouch the shadow under the ring. It can keep the shadow keep dark and natural.
Photoshop’s five most important blend modes, which are Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Color, and Luminosity. Even though Photoshop includes 22 others, these five blend modes are the ones you’ll use the most.
The Multiply blend mode darkens images, the Screen blend mode lightens them, and the Overlay blend mode increases contrast. The Color blend mode blends only the color of a layer, and Luminosity blends only the brightness!
As we’ll learn, Photoshop blend modes are grouped together based on what they do (lighten, darken, increase contrast, and so on) and these five are the stars of their groups..
Final effect

After above 4 steps, You can easy clean jewelry holding wax under the rings, But the important thing is that you need to train frequently and be familiar with how to use the stamp tool. Here are some tips to improve your stamp tool skills
4 tips to using stamp tool to define a sample area and brush new detail over the object
1.With the Clone Stamp tool selected, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (MacOS) an area of detail to set the sample point. A preview inside the Clone Stamp pointer shows the detail you will use for the retouching. The preview is useful for aligning sampled detail with other parts of the image.
2.Brush over the area where you want to add the sampled detail to cover an object. As you work, a crosshair indicates where the detail is copied from.
Inspect the results to check for repeating detail
Removing objects with the Clone Stamp tool can sometimes result in detail from the sampled area repeated where you used the tool.
3.Use the Clone Stamp tool with a smaller brush size to cover up obvious, repeating details.
Save your work
4.Save the file in PSD or TIFF format to retain the separate retouching layer you created.
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