How do I make jewelry or metal products look realistic in AI images?

Jewelry and metal products are particularly tricky for AI image generators because they require getting multiple details right at once: the way light reflects off different metal surfaces, the texture and material properties, and how shadows interact with shiny surfaces. A gold ring needs different lighting than a brushed steel watch, and a polished silver necklace catches highlights differently than matte brass. Generic tools often miss these subtleties, leaving you with flat or unconvincing results.

The problem is that tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Midjourney are trained on all kinds of images from the internet—not all of them are realistic product photos. Even when you add phrases like "ultra realistic" or "hyper detailed" to your prompts, the model is still drawing from a mixed dataset that includes illustrations, paintings, and low-quality photos. It doesn't have the specialized knowledge of how professional product photography actually works.

This is where AI tools built specifically for product photography come in. Nightjar, for example, was fine-tuned using only real, high-quality product images, so it understands how to render materials, reflections, and lighting the way they appear in professional studio photography. Instead of trying to describe realism in words, you're using a model that already knows what realistic product photos look like.