One of the awesome things about Photoshop is the ability to make dramatic changes to each photo. As with the rainbow photo, it takes time and effort to make drastic changes to an image - but oh, they're worth it.
Sweet Baby
Levi's session was shot on the table in his kitchen. Just a bit over a week old, he was a perfect model once he went to sleep. Working with an infant requires the ability to pose them, remove hands, snap the photo and start over again. There's not a lot of time for prop changing in between, so Photoshop is the infant photographer's friend.
Again, we shoot in RAW, so the initial image looks yucky - it's very cool color, which doesn't play into the warm, sweet baby "look".
We were using a neutral colored rug - the texture will work for a boy or a girl and make the photo more dynamic, without limiting ourselves to one shade of blue or pink or whatever. Photoshop gives us the opportunity to control that. You can see in the background that the assistant (me) did a rather lousy job of filling the frame with the rug. Oops. Fortunately, we can fix that in Photoshop as well. There's also a little stuff that needs to be retouched, like the flaky skin on his hand, the kind of uneven skin tone, etc - and we'll get to that, too.
Processing started with a little color/contrast adjusting to make the image look like the JPEG you get when looking at the back of the camera. That delivered this:
The next step was re-creating the background to fill in where I goofed. I don't have the image of just that step, as I edited this photo almost two months ago. After that, it was a matter of changing the rug/background to fit the image. Bright blue didn't seem to suit the image, but the darker blue was a nice match for a baby boy. Add in a little clean up of the aforementioned pale pink infant skin and the little flakes on the hand and the final image looks like this:
All in all, this took about an hour, dealing with all of the tiny detail (eek, see that rug?) and working at 300% magnification.
Since this post is about a sweet baby, I'm going to float this out there: I'm looking for a cool mom and dad that would cherish the opportunity to have a photographer present at the birth of their child. As a mom to three, I can see the appeal - great photographs without taking away from truly experiencing your child's birth. As it is a favor to us, the right family would have a bundle of photos of their bundle of joy for -- well, get in touch with me and we'll talk details. If you're interested and expecting before the end of the year, email us at
info@snydersphotography.com - or please pass our info along to someone who might be!
Still on my list to cover in this little Photoshop series: removing people. Yes, I've done it. Yes, in photos that have been posted on the
Facebook page and here on the blog. No, you didn't notice. :) If you have a guess, though, I'd love to know which photo you think it is! Check out the Del Llano/Carter/Ruyffelaert/Phillips Family galleries and leave a comment below with your guess!
