The magic of newborn photography isn't just about having a perfectly sleepy baby (although that is very important!) the real magic happens once the session is finished and the photographer uploads the images and begins the process of editing and retouching to produce the perfect image for their client.

If I told you that on average a newborn photography session can take 4-5 hours to edit, would you believe it? it's true!  Newborn photography isn’t just about the few hours that you spend with your photographer while she is photographing your newborn baby, did you know that your newborn photographer actually spends more time outside of the studio editing, cropping and retouching your images than it took her to photograph your baby? After your session is over your photographer will upload your images to an external hard drive to ensure that they are in a safe place before the process of editing can even begin. Next the process of culling through the images begins. During this time your photographer will go through sometimes hundreds of images to delete any blurry images, or images where your eyes may be closed or even duplicates. This process allows the photographer to narrow the images down to the very best images, and then the editing can begin.

Now your photographer will begin the process of making global adjustments to the photo in the form of exposure, white balance, temperature and any cropping that is needed. These basic adjustments lay the foundation for what the finished image will look like. Next she will move on to any larger edits that need to happen. This is where she will fix the background or blanket the baby is on. Once she is happy with the general look of the image it is time to to move on to editing the baby.

Now it is time to start editing the skin. This is often the most tedious part of the editing. As you know, every baby is different and so is their skin tone and texture. Some babies are jaundiced or have some redness in their skin at the time of their session and they will require skin tone editing, others most often have little blemishes or baby acne the needs to be removed. I wish there was a magic wand that could be waved and all of it would disappear, but technology hasn't caught up to that yet! So all of this editing must be done by hand, blemish by blemish. The final step is smooth out the skin and sharpen newborns eyelashes and lips.

So next time you see beautiful newborn image on a photographers page or website and you like the image, please let him or her know! I promise they spent a lot of time getting that image perfect to post!