At my last newborn portrait session, I decided to try something different. Instead of inking the baby’s feet to get a print like they do in the hospital, I pulled out my Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner! While the baby’s mom held her little one, I warmed up the scanner glass a bit with the heating pad. Then I gently pressed the tiny little foot to the Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner bed and scanned it! Baby Jenna didn’t budge, and I got a clean scan.
Now, what to do with that little scanned foot? Jenna’s parents had ordered a disk of images they wanted to use in a slideshow as a screensaver. I decided to incorporate her little footprint on the cover image of her disk.
After I designed the layout, I started thinking about how I could make her footprint actually look more like a print and less like a complete image.
I extracted just her foot from the base image – doing my best to only keep the parts that were in contact (even light contact) with the scanner bed to better replicate the look of a print. After that, I used the Magic Wand Tool to select the lighter tones and saved them to their own layer. Once that was done, I was able to delete the lighter tones from the background (which I had converted to a layer so I could have transparent pixels). After that, it was just a matter of selecting two colors that went well with the elements I used to create the rest of the layout. I chose two colors that were fairly similar so I could have some depth in the print, but not too much contrast.
Tutorial by Jennifer Hamilton
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