Last minute baby shots

[Mercy299]

These are a couple of photos I took when I was shooting some cheerleader photos in the studio. One of the mothers of the cheerleader had brought the the baby along, and who can resist a baby. What do you think? Any suggestions for pp. I couldn't do much about the wardrobe, but is the lighting ok? Open to any and all constructive criticism. After all, I am here to learn.

[dmmiller]

I am far from an expert... but I like #2 the best.
I think its cuz the skin is softer looking than the first.

Very sweet shots.

[cdmonkey]

Hope you dont mind I really like the first one but i thought it needed a little extra.

Carl

[Mercy299]

Thanks Carl ! How did you do that? The lighting brings out the baby and makes him pop without taking away from the softness of the baby. I would love to do that to the original file if you could tell me how. Thanks for the nice comments.

[cdmonkey]

Glad you like it. I made the edit in photoshop.
Duplicate the layer, then using levels I increased the right hand slider to brighten all the white, I also tweaked the left hand and middle slider to retain the contrast.
this blew out some of the highlights on the skin so I erased them so that you could so the base layer.
flatten layer then used the dodge tool to selectively lighten some of the material that still wasnt bright enough.
duplicate layer again and run a gaussian blur, i think around 9 but you may need to do it more on a larger image.
then set the layer opacity to 40 or 50 %
erase the blurred layer around the face so that the detail is still retained.
then add border using canvas size.
I think that was about it.
Hope that helps
Carl

[Animalhouse702]

These are beautiful, and I love "cdmonkey's" edit!