The problem with photographing babies, especially newborns, is that their skin can be a tad blotching or flaky. This often puts parents off wanting to have professional portraits taken at such a young age. I’m sure many of you will have heard the line “We’ll wait until he/she is a bit older”. It’s a real shame as you can get some amazing shots while they’re so small.

Normally when we shoot babies we like to do a series of shoots throughout the 1st year. We start off at the newborn stage and shoot only black and white images. Then a few months later we prefer to do another simple shoot in both colour and black and white. The third photo-shoot is a far more elaborate one. We use props, lots of Photoshop and interesting locations.

In terms of editing the images for a newborn, you could spend hours and hours retouching the skin or you could, like us, create a series of stunning black and white images:

This is a really simple techniques which utilises the red channel. Best of all it can be done with 1 click.

To make life a little easier I’ve created two actions. The Baby B&W 1 will add an a levels adjustment layer to the image for a little extra contrast. Baby B&W 2 uses a Gaussian blur for a softer, brighter image.

These actions can be downloaded for free at the bottom of this post or at our Downloads page.

Original RAW

Baby B&W1

Baby B&W2

Download Black and White for Newborn Babies Action