Free Lesson #6 – Creating Beautiful Baby Skin in a Snap!

This FREE Lesson for Photographers is the 6th in a series, provided to you by the Maternity and Newborn Photography Prop Shop!!  It will show you how you can clear up red blotchy skin on a baby, and have them looking creamy and soft in under 5 minutes!

There is an Action that is required for this Lesson, and you can purchase it here.  It would have been WAY too long of a lesson to try to teach you how to do all the steps that are involved, so I just did it for you.

Okay, let’s get started.  Here is my image SOOC.  You can see that the baby has some pretty good red blotches, and the right side of its face is pretty red.  This is common in newborn photography, and people can spend hours trying to correct the problem.

There’s no way around taking out the prominent red blotches, and so I take about 30 seconds and remove them.  To do that, I use my Healing Brush Tool.

Now I’m just going to use the Tool on the very strong red spots.  I’ve circled them so you can see that there are only about 7 clicks I’ll be making (8 if you include the 1st click to grab the good skin).

After clicking on my Healing Brush Tool, I hold down my Option key (on a MAC) – (you’ll see the circle with the cross hair in it), and I click on a good area of the skin.  I clicked at the Red ‘X.’

Then, I simply paint over each red spot with my Healing Brush Tool. You only need to grab the good skin once.  No need to keep clicking on new good skin. (I also fixed the small piece of skin on the upper lip using the same Tool.)  Takes me all of 10 seconds.  Here is the resulting image.

Now for the magic.

I run an Action called Beautify my Baby.  It can be purchased at the Maternity and Newborn Photography Prop Shop. Here are the results.

You can see that the skin has made a huge improvement, and it’s soft and creamy in addition to calming the red.  On an image that didn’t have the big red area that this one did, this would end my post processing.

Total time…about 5 minutes at the most.

 

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This is the 2nd part of this FREE LESSON.  I use another Action called ‘Less Red, More  Yellow’ on it, that can be purchased here.

I chose this particular image for a reason.  I wanted to be able to take it further for you, and show you how to correct an intense problem area, like the large red area on this baby’s face.

There was no way to correct this problem with the Beautify My Baby Action, or any Action that works globally on an image, and I didn’t want to ruin the nice color of the rest of the baby’s skin that wasn’t so red.

So, I circle the area on the baby’s face that is still too red for my liking with my Lasso Tool, with a feather of 35 pixels.

 

This next image shows the area that I grabbed with my Lasso.

I then run my sweet little Action called Less Red, More Yellow.  This Action takes out red and adds yellow.  You can do this on your own (although please do not email me and ask how to do it), or you can purchase the Action at the Maternity and Newborn Photography Prop Shop.

Here is the results:

Running the Action once fixes a lot, but not to my standards.  So, I circle the area that is still too red, and run the Action again.  You can see that I have lasso’d a smaller area than previously.

This next image shows the results.

Now, I need to lighten up this same area a bit, so, I leave my dancing ants going so that I am still working on the same area… I open my Levels window, and drag the middle arrow to the left just a bit.

I click anywhere on the image to get rid of the dancing ants…and Whala!  I’m very happy with the way the skin looks now!

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Now, if we wanted to take this image one step further, I would add light and sparkle to the eyes.  But, that’s another Free Lesson!

 

FYI…The Actions are currently only available for Photoshop.  I don’t know Elements at all.  I have someone who has volunteered her time to try to make them work in Elements, and as soon as she is able to do that, I will post it on my FB Page, and make them available.