How to fix newborns’ skin color in Photoshop

If you’ve ever photographed newborns, you’ll know that one of the challenges is to properly capture the skin tones of the infant. This comes as a hurdle because many infants have an excess amount of red or blue in their skin depending on various health aspects.

While the goal isn’t to render their actual skin tone irrelevant, it’s nice to be able to skew the skin tone a little more towards what we’re used to seeing. To help show how it’s done, Phlearn has shared a helpful tutorial.

In the ten minute video, Aaron Nace shows how using a reference image can be used to help find a balanced skin tone that is natural. Specifically, Nace shows how you can create an average skin tone of another image to use as an RGB reference for adjusting the hue and saturation levels in your photograph.

It’s not the most efficient solution, but nine times out of ten it will yield the most accurate results and so long as your images were shot in the same lighting situation, you can copy the HSL adjustment layer to the other photos.