Please welcome back Arden Prucha Photography, who this time shares a very detailed tutorial: Using Photoshop to achieve the illusion of a baby placed in an usual situation. Arden is known in the photography community for her generous knowledge sharing and we’re thrilled to have her back again. If you haven’t read her previous article featuring newborn pullbacks and tips, check it out and be sure to follow Arden on Facebook.
A few months ago a girl friend let me know she had this awesome scale that would be perfect for a newborn session. When she brought it over I was thrilled, but unsure exactly how to utilize it properly in a session.
One of the most important tips I can share for newborn sessions is SAFETY. When I first started out in photography and kept up with photographers, I rarely saw behind the scenes footage leaving all poses up for interpretation. Is that baby REALLY hanging from a branch? Look at the baby chillin’ in the hammock, awh it’s all an illusion with lovely Photoshop to cover up the assistant’s hands and true set up. I think it’s very important to share the tips and knowledge behind certain poses, allowing baby to be put in the safest scenario and to educate other photographers, who may be clueless – to no fault of their own.
I will preface this tutorial by saying this isn’t the ‘ideal’ set up I had in mind, but in the end it proved to work out just fine. If I had my own studio, I would tweak the way some of these things were set up. The cool thing is that it still worked for me, but Photoshop was definitely necessary to create the ‘look’ I was going for.
During this session my assistant and I were trying to figure out the best way to take this photo. Luckily my clients had a black headboard so I used this as a simple backdrop and snapped a photo of my assistant holding the scale. (I was fortunate enough to have some black fur, that I placed underneath to add some black all around the scale (proved to be very helpful in Post Processing). Then knowing that the baby weighed 8lbs 9oz at birth I had my assistant press down the scale until it matched baby’s weight and snapped another photo! We ran into a slight problem when we were trying to photograph baby boy in the scoop of the scale, with the assistance and help of my sweet assistant (Shareen Frater). Everytime we slid him in all bundled and protected, he fought it… so I ‘gave up.’ Once home and looking through the images, I decided to ‘try’ something I had never done before… so here we go – let me attempt to explain!
Unsure where to shoot, I tried different walls in the house. Fortunately my client had a black headboard. This provided me with a ‘safe’ background that would be great for post processing!
