As a newborn photographer, I am always looking for new ways to speed up my editing workflow and make my tiny clients look their best. Newborn skin can be tricky and time consuming to edit. Some newborns have beautiful clear skin, but more often a newborn’s skin can be flaky, blotchy, and have little bumps and scratches. Most parents who hire me to take newborn portraits want to remember their newborn with beautiful clear skin. That’s why I use a few different newborn skin smoothing techniques.
In Photoshop, I use the spot healing brush, the healing brush, and the patch tool to touch up little marks, flakes, and blemishes on newborn skin. I also use different adjustment layers to correct red or jaundice skin tones. Then I use a skin smoothing action or plugin to give the baby’s skin a final polish.
There are many actions on the market for touching up newborn skin and many ways you could go about it by hand in Photoshop. I typically use the Portraiture plug in or the De-Blotch action (part of Totally Rad’s Pro Retouch 2.0) for skin smoothing. But, I recently discovered that Adobe Photoshop CC now comes with its own skin smoothing plugin under the neural filters. I decided to test out these three methods to compare the results.
1. Portraiture
Portraiture is a plugin for Photoshop. You can also purchase it for Lightroom, but I have only used it in Photoshop so I can not comment on the Lightroom version. It comes with several presets that you can choose from, depending on the amount of smoothing you want on your image. I typically choose the “normal” preset and then tweak it to my liking.
The best thing about Portraiture is that it finds the skin tones in your image and creates its own mask. The smoothing is automatically applied only to the skin and does not affect details like eyes and hair. You can let it do this automatically or you can fine tune the mask yourself by using the eyedropper tool and selecting the skin tones on your image.
The biggest drawback is probably the price. It is $199, which is not too bad if you are a working professional photographer, but more prohibitive if you are a hobbyist or on a tight budget. For me, it was well worth the price since I have used it for years on thousands of images.
In this video, you can see how Portraiture works to smooth newborn skin.
As you can see in the video, I first touch up most of the flakes and blemishes in Photoshop with the spot healing tool before running a skin smoothing action.
In the comparison photo below, I wanted to see how Portraiture would work without touching up the skin first. This baby was a little older for her session and had more baby acne to touch up, so she was a good candidate to give it a try.
Portraiture does a great job at smoothing out skin without losing too much texture, but it does not totally hide the bigger blemishes. For a baby with more blemishes, I would still want to touch up the skin with the spot healing tool in Photoshop before running portraiture.
2. Pro Retouch 2.0 De-Blotch action
Pro Retouch 2.0 is a set of actions by Totally Rad. It costs less than Portraiture at $99, and includes other actions to touch up and enhance eyes, hair, lips, etc. I use the De-Blotch medium action on almost all my newborn clients, and occasionally with family, headshot, and maternity clients.
All the actions in Pro Retouch create their own layer in Photoshop, so you will need to manually brush it on where you want it to affect your image. Brushing it on each image can be a little tedious if you have a lot of images to edit. The extra work is worth it to me because I like the polish it gives to my images, plus it evens out skin tone and tones down hots spots in the highlights.
Here’s a video demonstration of how I edit newborn skin with the Pro Retouch De-Blotch action.
And here is De-Blotch Medium action applied to the portrait with no retouching or spot healing done beforehand.
Like the Portraiture example, the skin is smoothed but the bigger acne is not affected.
I will note that Pro Retouch does come with more aggressive skin smoothing actions that may work better in this case to smooth out the acne without having to spot heal them by hand. The downside of those aggressive actions is that the skin loses a lot of texture, and I prefer to preserve the skin texture as much as possible while touching up the skin.
3. Photoshop Neural Filter
The neural filters are a newer feature of Photoshop CC, released in October 2020. The skin smoothing filter needs to be downloaded but is free for Photoshop CC users, which is a huge plus! This is what motivated me to compare these three skin smoothing methods. I wanted to see if this free option was as good as the other two methods that I have used for years.
One big drawback for using Photoshop’s neural filters for newborn photography is that the skin smoothing filter only affects the face. Since I photograph naked babies a lot, this is not going to work for most of my newborn portraits. I prefer to smooth the skin on the face and the body of newborns. This filter would only work if you only photograph babies swaddled or wearing long-sleeved clothing. It runs on one face at a time, so I can see it being helpful for family or wedding photographers who might want to run it at different strengths on each person in an image.
Like Portraiture, it creates its own mask, so you do not have to brush it on manually which saves a lot of time. There are only two sliders to adjust so it’s simple to use, but not as customizable as Portraiture.
Here’s a video of me editing newborn skin with Photoshop’s neural filter for skin smoothing.
The good news about this filter is that it does the best job of the three on my baby with difficult skin. For this example, I ran it full strength and it cleared up all but the largest blemishes on her skin. The tradeoff is that more skin texture is lost in the process and the skin can start looking too plastic or fake.
Newborn skin smoothing techniques compared: before and after images.
Below I’m going to show you each of the three techniques (Portraiture, Pro Retouch De-Blotch action, and Photoshop Neural Filter) on two different newborns. In the before images, I’ve done the major edits except skin smoothing. Then I tested the three skin smoothing techniques on the same image. Each one is labeled below.
As you can see in these examples, the three methods of skin smoothing I compared all produce similar results! I am disappointed that the skin smoothing neural filter in Photoshop will only smooth the skin on the face, but in general I love the concept and I am hopeful that Adobe will continue to roll out new neural filters and improve upon the ones now available.
If I had to choose between Portraiture and Pro Retouch, I would choose Pro Retouch. It is half the price, and comes with other actions to enhance eyes, make hair look shinier, whiten teeth, and more. I love the look that the De-Blotch action gives to newborn skin and appreciate that it also evens out the skin tone and tones down the highlights for me. This is worth the extra time it takes for me to brush it on the skin.
I will continue to choose Portraiture for my family, maternity, and headshot images, though. I do not think you could go wrong with either Portraiture or Pro Retouch to give your newborn images that final polish.
Learn more of Bonnie’s newborn photography secrets! Her Click Photo School breakout session, Becoming a Baby Whisperer: Simply Beautiful Newborn Photography, launched April 20, 2021 (download any time). $25
Photos and videos by Bonnie Cornelius
More newborn photography tutorials and tips:
13 Tiny tweaks to take your newborn photography poses from good to great
How I edit newborn skin for a perfectly natural look every time
How to create a full newborn gallery with just two poses
7 Important safety tips for in-home newborn sessions during COVID
What to wear for newborn photo sessions: 16 tips for families
