I am not against AI on principle — I use it in other parts of my work, and pretending it does nothing would be silly. But newborn skin is the exact case where the current tools fail, and they fail in a way that is invisible to the person who edited the file and obvious to the person who made the baby.
In short
- Good at: masking, culling, denoise, first-pass colour
- Bad at: skin texture, small hands, faces at small sizes, anything invented
- The failure is not ugliness — it is a baby that is slightly not that baby
- Parents spot it in about a second, and never quite say why
- Everything I deliver is edited by hand, and that is the whole product
Where the tools are genuinely good
Subject masking is better than mine and faster than anyone's. Denoise on a high-ISO frame in a dim nursery is remarkable. Culling assistants are fine at throwing out the closed-eye frames. If AI saves you an hour of that per gallery, take the hour.
Where it falls apart
Skin texture. Newborn skin has three surfaces within a centimetre: flaking on the wrist, soft cheek, translucent eyelid. Generative smoothing averages them into one plastic surface. That is the tell everybody recognises and nobody can name.
Hands and feet. Ten fingers, ten toes, folded, overlapping, half hidden by a wrap. Generative fill guesses. I have seen an extra knuckle, a fused finger and a thumb that bends the wrong way — in files a photographer was about to deliver.
Faces at small sizes. Face-enhancement models are trained on adult faces. Applied to a newborn they subtly adultify: the nose narrows, the chin defines, the eyes open a fraction. The parent cannot tell you what changed, only that it does not look like her baby.
Anything invented. A generated fold in a blanket is harmless. A generated birthmark, or a removed one, is not. These photographs are evidence of what a week-old person looked like, and once you are inventing detail you are not photographing any more.
The test that settles it
Take a file you edited with AI skin tools and open it at 200% on the wrist and the eyelid. If the pores stop, the tool went too far. Then send the same original to a person and compare. I offer two free images precisely because this argument cannot be won in a paragraph — but it can be settled in Photoshop in five minutes.
Where this goes
The tools will get better; some of what I have written will be wrong in two years. What will not change is who carries the risk. If a mother notices something odd about her newborn's hands, that lands on your studio's name, not on the software's. Until the tools are reliable enough that you would not check, checking is the job — and checking every file by hand is most of what I charge for.
FAQ
No. Colour, skin, composites, cleanup — all by hand in Photoshop and Lightroom. Denoise on a genuinely noisy frame is the only place I would use a modern algorithm, and I will tell you when I do.
A preset is a recipe applied to everything. It does not know a flaking wrist from a fur blanket, so it either does too little everywhere or too much somewhere. That is why the first pass is global and everything after it is local.
Yes. A newborn gallery takes me longer than a batch action would. That time is the product — it is why the wrist still has pores when you zoom in.
Parents notice on their own child, always, and rarely say it out loud. They just do not order the album.
Deividas Kvederys — photographer and retoucher based in Lithuania, EU. 450+ weddings and 1,500+ sessions of my own before I started editing for other photographers, and I still edit every image myself. Newborn retouching · All genres and pricing