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I put together some Cake Smash info and wanted to share that here. But first, a fun before and after.

Some kids love their Smash. L-O-V-E it. Some hate it. And many others fall in between. They are interested for a bit and then either A) get bored or B) get grossed out at the frosting glued to their hands (And face. And belly. And feet. Etc.) If your child cries during his Cake Smash, please don’t feel bad. I get lots of moms and dads who feel bad because their kid is not enjoying the birthday cake thing. It’s common for some kids to get a little weird about it. I always pull out all of the stops when it comes to getting some smiles. I offer a spoon. I tell them to throw the cake or beat it like a drum. One of my kids might be home to help dance stuffed animals on my head or play peek-a-boo from behind my umbrella. We sing. Mom dances. I play videos on my iPad for them. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. All I really need is one great smile to complete a series of ten photos for you. But sometimes, the smile just doesn’t happen. I think any and all messy cake shots are cute to be honest so the set of pictures still turns out really nice.

Justin came over recently for a whole first birthday session (scroll here until you get to the balloons). He smiled and I got some wonderful shots of him with his balloons and Sesame Street dolls. But he was not interested in his birthday cake. At all. And if I am just working with that series of photos, there’s not much I can do. But since I had taken some happy shots with the balloons prior to the cake, I knew I had a few things to work with. And so I played around in Photoshop last night until I turned the lefthand photo into the right one and if I didn’t show you the side-by-side here today, no one would even know the difference. ;)

Oh that makes me happy! :)  I love that I am able to give one messy, big-grinned picture to his Mommy. :)

DISCLAIMER: Clients, please note that a headswap is not always possible. I need to be able to seamlessly patch on the smile and sometimes if baby’s head is tilted even a fraction of an inch the other way, it won’t look right. I do not swap heads (boy that sounds weird!) at a client’s request. I do so only if I am able and at my own artistic discretion.

If you have a Cake Smash booked with me or are thinking about booking one, I have put together some handy info for you. I got a little carried away with the rainbow colored text. ;)

Want to talk about a Cake Smash session for your little guy or gal turning one? Email me!

I am kind of liking my Friday before & after posts. :) I am really happy with the way this photo turned out.

Abby, 7 days new, was photographed in my home this past Monday. I did a few shots on my deep plum textured blanket but it sort of photographed more brown than I originally intended. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things because the photo was still crystal clear and that’s what truly matters but 1) for this set of photos, Abby had nothing on her head such as a cutesy hat or flowered headband and 2) We had just finished a few shots on a fuzzy brown blanket. I wanted to make sure she looked like a little girl in the final shot and I am super-happy with how it worked out. :) Abby has the cutest heart-shaped lips so that helped.

The top two photos are “befores”. Mom’s arm was in the shot originally so I started this series after I already removed her arm and patched in some blanket. Other than that, no editing was done to the top-left picture. You can see Abby had splotchy skin. In the top-right photo, splotches were gently airbrushed and cloned out.

Between the top and bottom shots, I worked a bit on the blanket. I decided not to go crazy with the fading here and just gently added a textured mask and some solid color (on a very low opacity) to keep the focus on the front of the frame.

The bottom two shots are my “afters”. I decided to edit these particular photos with more of a blue hue to them to bring back some of the purple in the blanket.  I went back with a fine-toothed comb and did some final tweaks to little red areas on her skin. I love the final coloring in the bottom-left photo and how beautiful and girly Abby looks. The blanket color changed pretty drastically but Abby’s skin is still creamy and soft. The bottom-right polished “after” is the same as the shot on the left but converted to black and white. I’m also digging the richness of the charcoal color the blanket gave off so I knew I had to include this edit as well.

What a scrumptious little peanut!

After a bunch of back-to-back newborn baby girls, I am looking forward to photographing a sweet lil’ boy this morning.

Have a beautiful day!

Today is the 100th day of school for my two older kids. In honor of this exciting day in the life of a Miller child, I present to you 100 Legos in a glass jar (what Andrew brought in to share with his class).

I also have a Friday before & after to share!

Isn’t she cute?

Gearing up for three shoots in a 24 hour period over here. I am tired just thinking about it! In the middle of it all, I need to find time to finish my book!

Have a great weekend!

A quick little Friday peek and it comes in the form of a before and after! :) Always important to show how my newborns are never, ever put in unsafe positions. More often than not, Mom or Dad’s hands or arms are Photoshopped out of trickier shots. Safety first!

Here, I rolled out my black seamless paper which doesn’t photograph as dark as I would like. No worries though, because I just needed something dark and solid. It didn’t matter that the floor, which was actually my jet black fleecy blanket, was a shade or two darker.

Baby was sound asleep which allowed us to place her in the helmet nicely. Dad steadied the helmet and baby with one arm. Not sure we would have been as successful if she was quirmy but thankfully, she was happy to snooze. :)

After, I did most of the tricks mentioned here. I edited the original shot’s colors first because I knew I wanted to just tone up her skin and not edit after all of my black was painted on. Then I created a layer using my polygonal lasso tool around baby and helmet and inverted, filled in this layer surrounding baby with the darkest black (eyedrop-sampled from the blanket), masked all around her zooming in and using a variety of brush tips, added a light pattern to the black for some noise (remember: to help with banding although I am not even sure that would be an issue with this pitch black background), clipped the pattern to just the black so baby didn’t have pattern on her skin, flattened and then edited out splotches on her skin, eyelids (a bit of redness), a sticky patch on her hand from her IV…. I also cleaned up her diaper and the white under her head so it would look more like a soft blanket rather than a hand towel I grabbed quickly. ;)

Yes I edited her belly button too because her umbilical stump was on the bigger side and I didn’t want it to take anything away from the final shot. I made sure to include two copies in her gallery: the one shown below and one with a small amount of the belly button in place. If I take it upon myself to edit something that I am not entirely sure Mom and Dad will like, I always give them two options with the final gallery.

Have a super-awesome day!

I love when photographers share before and after shots. Before shots are commonely labeled as SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera) and afters are post-processing, meaning we played around in our editing programs bringing out your photo’s maximum potential. I do all of my processing in Photoshop. I was working on a few edits last night of a beautiful little 4 month old. I usually don’t photograph babies between 2 weeks and “happy sitters” (about 6 months) but it was really important to Mom that we got some photos now before the 6 month mark since she missed having a newborn session. It’s not that I don’t adore little 4 months olds, because I love babies. But man, they are hard to photograph! They are too little to sit but too big for most of my props, so you are kind of left scratching your head as far as what to do with them. (psst: A Bumbo comes in mighty handy for close-ups!)

This entry isn’t really about 4 month old sessions though. This is about before and afters! I had Mom prop baby up with one arm for a few shots during this shoot. No worries I assured her. I would just Photoshop her arm right out after. Like this:

That’s a fairly easy edit as far as removing the arm goes. Since baby was on a solid color, I just needed to paint on a new background, carefully masking around my subject and then I added a bit of noise to my pink layer after. Why noise you ask? (And no, you won’t even be able to detect it with your naked eye right now. Not unless you zoomed in a few hundred percent). Noise helps during printing so we don’t get gradient lines, or banding.

We also had an arm in this shot here, and something like this is more tricky since now we are working on a patterned wallpaper. Since my subject was sitting pretty centered right under that big cream diamond, I used my polygonal lasso tool (I realize I may be speaking French to the non-Photoshop users. Just sit back, relax and enjoy the images), created a layer over Mom’s arm and the rest of that side of the frame, used the lasso tool to carefully select background from the good, armless left side of the frame, copied it, flipped it over as a mirror image and pasted it over the layer on the arm side. Then I had to do a bunch of cloning and patching. And I cleaned up the white floor molding. I have no idea if that just made sense to anyone but me but alas, that’s what I did.

4 month olds are also very drool-y. If you look under the “G” in my watermark, you’ll notice I had to clone out a bunch of drool and spit marks. ;)

Goodness she’s cute!

Here’s a cake smash sample. Here’s a bit of insider info: I don’t work in a very large space. However, you would never know it from my finished photos. :) Many times I need to fill in solid paper on my smash photos if I am doing a pull-back shot and trying to get my subject really centered and not cropped with lots of clean, open background surrounding him. I like that look. Here’s what a before would look like along with an after. Don’t forget to add the noise to the solid layer so you don’t get banding!

Of course there’s always editing that comes with a newborn’s skin. This little beauty actually had really great skin. Many newborns have teeny red spots or very dry, flaky skin. Here I only needed to remove the scratch on her right cheek. I also lightened her under eye creases and a few slight facial shadows.

Here’s one last newborn sample using my little model from above.

This was one of those shots where I was repositioning myself on the floor near my newborn pillow, getting ready for a few sleepy shots and baby lifted her head out of the blue. Snap snap snap. Lets see if I caught anything…. And I did. I thought her little lips looked so cute here. But I needed to 1) fade my blanket and 2) edit the red splotch under her lower lip. I also opted for a warmer, more vintage skintone post-processing since I didn’t want to have a stark white blanket and a very pink baby on it. I already edited her in a birdie hat very clean and crisp so this called for something different. I also loved the classic simplicity of the black and white shot so I included that too. :)

And those, my friends, are just a small handful of tricks and as of today, non-secrets, regarding what goes into editing your photos after our session ends. I love meeting with you but I also love playing in Photoshop. :)

If these sort of posts interest you, make sure to leave a comment and tell me so! I always have tons of before and afters but I rarely think to share them side-by-side. These were just a few I had from sessions I shot in the past week or two. I would be happy to share more in the future though.

Next post, Project Life, Week 3! Have an awesome day!

I thought it would be fun to show one of my side-by-sides of a before & after shot from a recent newborn session. I am always calling my husband over to the computer to check out what I’ve done. I think he’s growing bored. LOL Maybe some of you guys will find this more entertaining. :)

During all of my sessions, I get asked questions (note: I love questions! I love to talk just in case you didn’t know that about me, so ask away)! I get asked stuff like “How long have you been doing this?” or “Did you go to school for photography” or “So when will our pictures be ready?” Many people (usually the husbands; sorry guys!) are surprised to know that the session itself is only 50% of the process. When you pay Gina Rae Miller Photography, please know that you are not just paying me to photograph your child or family for an hour or two. That’s only the beginning. Before I ever started garnering a group of clients and professionally shooting, I was a graphic designer (still am of course!) I live, breathe and sometimes sleep Photoshop. I love working in the program and taking an okay image from nice to amazing. It’s crazy how lost you can get in this program and the stuff you can do. So yes, after our session I take your collection of photos and then I. edit. them. all. It’s a lot of work. It’s work that I absolutely love to do. And so, that is where I spend the other half of my time after our session wraps. I try to create images you will absolutely love.

Here’s one before & after of a cute little 7 day old boy named Connor. The before is of course on the left (SOOC means Straight Out Of Camera). The finished image and the one that will be added to my client’s CD is on the right. You can see I took out the red spots from his skin, cleaned the wrinkles from the orange blanket, polished the skin tone, popped the overall colors, sharpened everything, etc etc etc. Enjoy this little peek into Gina Rae Miller Photography AFTER our session ends.

Here are both images a little bigger. I think it’s most effective showing them side-by-side but you can see details better at this larger size.

Straight off of my camera card.

Post-processing. Was Connor dreaming of baseball perhaps? What a cutie!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend and the upcoming week!

If you’re a photographer, I bet there’s a good chance that as soon as you wrap a shoot and have some pocket money, you are looking at ways to spend it! It’s a curse. You want new looks all of the time and those looks come at a price. An actual monetary price as well as the price of your laundry room AKA storage space. I swear it looks like a medium-sized bomb or at the very least, a series of small bombs went off in there. I digress…

I am always looking and drooling over the new backdrops and floordrops I find online. Ballpark, they can run anywhere from $75 – $250. Needless to say, it’s not that easy to just add 5 new drops to your cart and checkout. I look at each one very closely and really try to choose something that I can use on a wide range of subjects: boys and girls, babies & beyond. I would love to pick some of the bolder, more colorful patterns but I figure I’ll tire of those looks easily. So I came up with an affordable solution.

FABRIC

Fabric makes for beautiful backdrops that won’t break the bank! There’s so much to pick from so I recommend you do a little research and choose your pieces wisely. I took a sample picture this morning to show you what I mean.

The larger paisley piece on the bottom is awesome. It’s 54″ wide and that’s 2 yards hanging there. It’s a medium weight cotton and really has nice weight to it. Not much wrinkling at all. I am planning on doing some headshots on these later this afternoon so please disregard the lack of flooring. You could easily run a piece of molding along the bottom of the fabric, add your floordrop and have a great new look. How pretty would this one look paired with a dark wood floor? Two yards of this Premier Prints fabric cost me $14.00.

The black & white damask piece is 44″ wide and I had 1 yard cut. So you’ll see that even if I had 2 yards cut, the width was remaining quite narrow and it’s only suitable for one subject (I really bought this piece for newborn shoots but I am going to do some close-ups on it during today’s session). This is a lighter weight cotton that I needed to iron. It’s Michael Miller’s Delovely and cost me around $7.50.

Would I use a giant piece of fabric for a family session? Most likely, no. Would I use it for one or two children or even toss a piece in my suitcase of props that I bring along to newborns? Absolutely. And for pennies.

I order my fabric from fabric.com. They have really fast shipping plus it’s free for orders over $35.  I also like that you can order generously-sized swatches from them which I recommend doing if you are unsure about what you’re seeing. Fabric can be tricky to purchase if you can’t see and feel it first.  I have lots of cute boy-friendly fabrics that I’ll get to put to good use in a few weeks. Oh and one final tip. Use PVC pipe to roll your fabric around for storage. Folding each piece is going to lead to creases that need to be ironed out each time.

I see so many photos posted on Facebook giving away tips, tricks and behind-the-scenes photos that help fellow photographers out. Maybe this little tip will help you. :)

Happy Sunday!