I am novice at this sort of photography so please bear with me. The picture is of a bracelet

taken with a canon 40d and marco lens. I have attached the photo when taken with the camera and then another after

I have used photoshop. In photoshop I used auto colour, and then brightness 70% and contrast 17%.

I used the white paint tool to take out much of the grey.

I am trying to create professional looking jewelry photos with white back grounds.

I know there must be a host of things I'm doing wrong, so pointers in the right direction would be

appreciated.

Many Thanks

You should have more light when you take a photo, then use photoshop to cut a picture.

Yes I have 3 lamps but when I view the picture on the camera after taking it the background is very bright, but

when I view it on my laptop I get the one I have attached?

Yes I have 3 lamps but when I view the picture on the camera after taking it the background is very bright, but

when I view it on my laptop I get the one I have attached?

Read my reply in your original posting under Equipment. More light will not change anything. Your camera will still make the background grey unless you adjust your exposure as I explained in my earlier reply.

Thanks I am trying this now and will let you know how I get on.

I downloaded your photo and boosted the exposure in Lightroom while painting localized lower exposure on the bracelet. This is far from ideal. You really should use an off camera flash unit to illuminate the while background by placing the flash behind the subject and taking manual exposure readings off of the subject and not the background. You are trying to create what is termed a high key photo. You can look on youtube and see many tutorials on how to do this.

Anyway, here is a doctored up copy of your photo:

The reason your photo is gray is because it's underexposed, meaning that too little light is reaching the sensor. The reason for that is because you have a white background, which is fooling the built-in camera meter into thinking that there's more light than there is actually. You need to compensate for the metering error by using the exposure compensation in your camera (look at the manual to see how to get to it) and set it to +2. That should give you the clean shots you're looking for straight in the camera, without the need to do anything in photoshop. Don't forget to set the exposure compensation back to 0 after you're done shooting.

Hope this helps.