Arden Prucha Photography

I mentioned through my FB page that I shot nearly an ENTIRE Newborn Session on the couple’s front porch.  The light was much better than inside, but there were a lot of shadows that I had to be very mindful of while photographing.

I purchased this pouch from Etsy here!  Laura has been so great to me – thanks for the great customer service! 🙂

This is my first time using one of these props and I had only received it two days before my session, so I knew it wouldn’t be pro-perfect yet.

I had dad help me A LOT on this session (Mom smells too much like food to handle that sweet and sleeping baby).

You can see I placed a black board behind Baby Bruce.

I then had Jim hold his son VERY CAREFULLY with both hands.

One Hand: Underneath the sack supporting baby

The Other Hand: holding up the sack so that it appears to be hanging.

Here is the Original or Straight Out Of the Camera (SOOC):

Let ME tell you what is noticeably wrong with this photo: the background isn’t the same color, it is shadowed, and it ends on the right, the hand of Dad is unwanted (but necessary), and the baby is a little more red that I would like.

For editing here are some steps I took:

• First some basic adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) – exposure,  bumped up the dark, darkened the shadows, and de-saturated the red hues.
• In Photoshop (CS4): Using the Magnetic Lasso Tool I created a patch around the bottom of the sack where the hand is all of the way to the lower right corner.
• I then cloned out the hand and made sure all of the background was a consistent black.
• I painted all of the areas outside of the sack with the paint tool matching the cloned area.
• Now, this is a difficult process because the black painting was bleeding into the sack and baby a little bit.  I used my history brush to return those edges as they were prior to painting.
• Using the burn tool I darkened all of the edges to match the painted background.
• Using Totally Rad Actions: Select O Pop and Select O Sharp on the sack for some sharpness.
• I then used Smooth-O-Matic to create a nice soft image, but I added a layer mask and took ‘smooth-o-matic’ off of the sack (using a soft black brush) so that it was still nice and textured.
• Converted to BW and added a soft light layer for an additional POP.

(Some people are against actions, they assist me in my final product.  I am happy to use helpful tools, but I still have a knowledge of what I am doing!)

Voila:

Side by Side:

Then I thought – I want the baby to be smaller with more black space!

So, I:

• created a NEW File (18″x12″)
• cropped the photo above (8″x12″)
• dragged the image into the new file
• then using the paint tool matched the exposed sides with the images black background
• flattened the image and…

TADA:

(which one do you prefer?)