I thought it would be fun to share some of what goes on behind the scenes at SMB Photography. Newborn photography is a lot of work, and I wanted to share a little peek into some of that work. I am planning on making this a series, so my client's can see more of what goes into to each and every session I do. If there's anything you'd like to see, I'd love to hear from you!

Editing is one of my absolute favorite things to do, but it's certainly not one of the quicker aspects of newborn photography. On average a session takes about 3 hours from start to finish, but the behind the scenes stuff is much more time consuming. Each image I present my client's takes between 5-15 minutes editing in Photoshop to get an image to my specific style. A lot of that time is spent fixing babies skin issues; baby acne, flaky skin, redness/jaundice, etc. I do not remove anything that is permanent, but if it's something that will be gone within a few weeks, I'll take care of it in Photoshop. 

So let's take a look at a SOOC (straight out of camera) image of babies skin, and the edit I would normally do on it. (You can enlarge the images by clicking on them)

As you can see, this adorable little guy had some baby acne, blotchiness, and flaking going on. I remove those things with a technique called frequency separation (FS), which allows me to correct the texture issues and color issues separately. There is no skin smoothing applied in the after image, only corrections with FS.

As you can imagine, with each image taking on average 10 minutes to edit, it takes 5-8 hours to edit an entire session. Between the time at your session, and the time it takes to edit your images, I spend 8-12 hours on each any every newborn session I do, and the truth is, I enjoy every minute of it. 

Here's a before and after with the full final image of this adorable little guy: