I’ve posted a few newborn shoots lately and I thought it’d be fun to give a “behind the scenes” look into one of recent photos to show how it was set up and edited. Newborn photography is a blast, and there are a ton of great photographers out there who are insanely great at it. There’s no shortage of cute photos with newborns in adorable poses, placed in baskets, hung from a tree branch wrapped in cheesecloth, sleeping on a guitar, etc., and it may be easy to assume that the babies were just placed there while sleeping and magically stayed that way without squirming. Yyyyeah, not so much :) Newborns squirm, move, and flop a lot, so extra special attention has to be given and safety needs to be the #1 priority! Here’s a quick look into a simple “head on the arms” pose…
Before (straight out of the camera):
After:
I use both Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 for my editing, and for this photo I cropped in Lightroom then adjusted the white balance to warm it up a little bit. I then opened it up in Photoshop for a little extra TLC.
The first step was to remove Amanda’s hand. On a new layer I brushed over it using the same color as the background, and then used the clone stamp tool to cover up where her finger covered the head. I added another layer and blended in the corners a little with the same color brush. After the hand was removed, I added a Levels adjustment layer and brightened up the whites a little bit, and the mid tones ever so slightly. Since the skin still looked a little reddish to me (well, magenta), the final step was to add a Selective Color adjustment later to bring down the magenta and increase the cyan a tad. That’s it!!
From start to finish the editing took about 10 minutes, and most of the time spent was removing Amanda’s hand. I’d MUCH rather spend a few extra minutes in post-processing time than risk the safety of a newborn!
I hope this helps!
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