About 6 months ago I did a post on great ideas for baby pictures, and it has turned out to still be the single most looked-at post on the blog by far.  There must be lots of people that want great photos of their newborns!  (We’re actually in that newborn-picture-taking mode too, right now, so I know the feeling!)  Anyway, I thought it would be worthwhile to scour around for some more good tips to include here.

Here are four good posts from another blog from a few years ago.  Not a lot of pictures, but lots of good content:

Newborn portrait tips for birth announcements — Framing and composition tips, as well as some other things like harsh lighting and red-eye problems.

Newborn picture ideas and tips — A good over-the-shoulder pose for newborns to keep their head up.

Best Time for Newborn and Baby Portraits — Timing to get the best portraits of your baby.

Look Them In The Eye — Get down on their level.

If there are any other types of things you’re wondering about as far as taking baby pictures go, ask away in the comment section!

Another movie poster design:

Here is some of the work done on this one:

• Added some lavender coloring to the background.  To get the fades in and out, there’s a solid lavender layer behind the baby image.  The baby image has a layer mask.  In that mask the gradient tool was applied to make a gradient up by the head (which then had to be cleaned up a little with some painting over the head area so the hair wasn’t lavender).  It was applied again at the bottom (with a white-to-transparent mode to add to the other gradient and not destroy it), and then again finessed a bit with a paint brush to not make it an even fade out across the image, and allow the hands to be fully opaque.
• The shadows in the skin were lightened up a bit, especially in the face.

You can see this and other images slightly larger in our gallery.

Here’s a recent movie poster announcement design, with some of the work done below:

• Lightened the image overall.
• In the process of lightening, the outfit would have been a similar color to the surrounding fabric, so we let the outfit go more towards white, and loosely painted the background fabric a pinker color (in color blend mode).
• Because of the amount that things had to be lightened, the skin color needed some adjusting once it was light enough.  We used a HSV adjustment layer to add more yellow, as it was quite pinkish/purple otherwise.
• The top fadeout is almost just a simple gradient, but it seemed to make sense to keep the head from fading out at the top, so the mask had a gradient first, and then we painted white where the head was to keep it opaque while the surroundings faded out on the sides.
• The title was fun to work on as well, as there are quite a few layers and effects in there.  The most interesting parts are a gradient from maroon to red to purple, and some white dots to look like stars in a sunset sky.

This one also had a little extra meaning, as the father is a real movie critic!  Congratulations to you both on your new addition!

This was another Christmas Card we did this year:

There was a fair amount of compositing work that was done.

• Had to cutout holes in the door where the windows were, to see through to the pictures behind.
• Recolored the house in the background to have more contrast and more of a blue color.
• Painted some snow falling with an irregularly-shaped brush that had scattering settings on it to make more than one flake at a time with different sizes and rotations.
• Painted some snow onto the windowsills with a simple white brush.  By painting it on a layer behind the door, it wasn’t necessary to get the edges of the windows perfect.
• Rotated the people pictures to work together.
• Cutout the people from their backgrounds by painting black into a mask for the areas we don’t want to see.
• Scaled and shifted everyone appropriately to get the right size relationships for their distance from the camera.
• Recolored the children to feel like they were all in the same lighting, and colored the parents with more blue to look more like they are outside.
• Added more books to the stack by copying a few and pasting them with different sizes and coloring.
• Darkened the bottom of the image more so the text would show up better over it.

This was the first Christmas card of the season this year:

Here is some of the work that was done:

• Cropped the image to what you see here – it was a wider image.
• Darkened the background and lower parts of the image by painting into the mask of an exposure adjustment layer.  This was both to make the subjects pop out more, as well as to make some darker areas for the text to read better on top.  There’s a lot of busy background texture, which would make overlaid text hard to read by default.
• Cut part of the “L” out for Santa’s hat to cover up, using a mask on the text layer of the title, and painting the area where the hat overlaps black.  It was a little more tricky because the hat has a soft feathery edge.

Overall, it was fun to do both a magazine cover and a Christmas card for a little change!