When your newborn photographer is also a graphic designer, something magical happens.
Photoshop is an extremely intricate software program; it’s the number 1 editing program in Photography. It’s complicated, though, and I’m lucky that because I’m educated in graphic design, I know the program extremely well.
While in graphic design school I was fortunate to learn Photoshop like the back of my hand.
I love that it gives me total freedom with my images.
Because I am an expert at Photoshop, I love that I don’t have to:
- Deliver unedited images
- Minimally edit images
- Purchase a “preset” that is then put on images to achieve an “edited” look
- Pay someone else to edit my images
Sometimes I photograph an image exactly as I want, sometimes I will be inspired to change colours, and sometimes I will photograph an image and decide, after looking at it in Photoshop, that I envision something quite different… and I can make that happen.
I love editing my images.
In my opinion, when you hire a photographer you are choosing an artist. To me, the majority of that artistry happens in Photoshop so I can’t fathom paying a generic retouch business to edit my work (even though it would save me a lot of time). It wouldn’t really be my work.
I spend from 20 minutes to 1.5 hours editing each image I deliver to my clients. I have a fine art style and that’s why I offer fewer images at a high artistry.
Let’s review the above image:
The BEFORE (unedited) actually looked quite nice in the gallery of images my clients chose their favourites from. Of course, when you compare it to the AFTER (finished edit) there is really no comparison.
Babies photograph very magenta. They look purply, reddish, pink. Their feet tend to be a darker purple than their bodies (because of their circulation). They tend to have a lot of flakes, red patches, and random bits of hair on their skin. They can also have baby acne. (This little sweetie didn’t have baby acne.)
Originally I really liked the setup of pink blankets and the blue pillow against the white wood backdrop, but as I was editing I decided I wanted the blankets to be blue to match the pillow, the drape underneath her to be grey like her hand-knit bonnet and sleeper, and then I started finding the wood background distracting so I decided to eliminate and reduce the grains of the wood. I didn’t want them all gone, just reduced enough to let the baby girl shine.
I don’t edit my images to be all one tone. I like to separate my tones so I get pops of colour and I can make my subject the star. This image took me a significant amount of time to edit but I know that my clients love it and will cherish it forever. That’s what’s important to me.
If I’d edited the Before it would be a cherished image. But the After has WOW FACTOR and that’s what I want to deliver to my clients.
