How I Edit A Newborn Baby’s Skin – Kettering Newborn Photographer

A newborn baby girl lays wide awake in a rustic wooden bed during her photo shoot with Kettering newborn photographer Karl Drage

Newborn baby’s skin is incredibly delicate. Contrary to what you see on newborn photographer’s websites, however, it is seldom perfect! This blog post is to reassure new parents that this is entirely normal! I’ll also discuss how I go about editing newborn baby’s sessions that take place in my baby photography studio near Kettering, Northants.

Introduction

You want to get ahead of the curve and have a slot booked with your preferred newborn photographer. But, when Baby finally appears, his or her skin is far from perfect! What do you do?! Well, the simple answer is nothing, as that this is completely normal. I would estimate that approximately one baby in ten to visit us has anything vaguely approaching flawless skin, and even if they do, chances are, there will be somewhere on their body that is imperfect.

The remaining nine out of ten might suffer from flaky skin, blotchy red areas, spots, gunky eyes etc, and frequently in combination! These can look FAR worse under studio lights and worse still after we’ve performed a few outfit changes. Don’t worry, though, your newborn photographer should take care of all of that for you.

Newborn baby girl suffering with peeling skin on her body.

This little girl was suffering quite badly with peeling skin on her body when she came for her newborn photo shoot.

Edited Newborn Baby Girl - Perfect! - Kettering Newborn Photographer

Tidied up perfectly with a bit of work in Photoshop! – Kettering Newborn Photographer

A Sympathetic Approach – How I Edit Newborn Baby’s Skin

I consider my approach to editing newborn baby’s skin to be a sympathetic one. At the end of the process, you should still be able to tell it’s your baby! Like every photographer, I follow my peers on social media for inspiration, but also to work out what I want to avoid. There are photographers out there who will turn your precious bundle of joy into a nearly white, featureless porcelain doll that bares little-to-no-resemblance to your own baby.

There have undoubtedly been occasions where this would have been the easy way out, but you should be able to expect more than that from your photographer. Don’t get me wrong, there are situations where you have to push things further than ideal, but skin should still have texture, and little hairs should be visible.

I make use of a range of Photoshop tools to aid with the reduction of each type of imperfection, but ALWAYS with the aim of retaining as much detail as possible. It is entirely common for me to spend upwards of 15 minutes editing a single image. When you consider that some parents have received more than 80 edited images in their password-protected web gallery, that’s a whole lot of editing time!

As the slider above shows, the aim is not to produce something that looks like it’s just been ripped from a cardboard box, just an accurate, largely-blemish free, representation of your baby.

A Typical Newborn Edit

The video below gives a good idea of the types of processes I go through while editing pictures of your baby. The original version ran to just over 12 minutes and has therefore been sped up five times.

Hopefully you feel somewhat reassured now that your baby’s skin IS completely normal. If you do have an specific concerns, or areas you’re particularly keen to be addressed, speak to your photographer during your session.