Retouching portraits of children

Retouching children’s portraits requires a surprising amount of skin smoothing. Baby’s skin is a proverbial reference for smoothness. This is why it is expected that skin in a child’d portrait would be impeccably smooth. In reality, children have very thin, quite translucent skin, so an unretouched portrait shows variations of colour, as well as small blood vessels under the skin. While this image is technically accurate, it appears unnatural, because of our expectations of smooth baby skin.

I have just finished post-processing a series of photos that my associate Armando and I took last week for an advertisement campaign of a dance school. I used Portrait Pro Studio 12 – a retouching software that can be called as an add-on from Photoshop. I found that the default settings for a “girl under 12 years old” result in too much processing for my taste. Through some trial and error, I found that these global tweaks give more reasonable results:

• Turn off face sculpting and lighting effects. Children’s faces are rather round and flat; the Portrait Pro algorithms for enhancing the shape of the face detract from these features.
• Reduce the default amount of skin smoothing (controlled by the Master Fade slider under Skin Smoothing Controls) by half.

Before applying the Portrait Pro filter, which appear on a separate layer, I make a stamp visible layer underneath it (create new layer, then press Shift-Option-Command-E). This way, if at a later point I decide that the retouching effects are too strong, I can reduce the opacity of the layer containing them to tone them down.