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- Jan 18, 2009
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- Fort Myers, FL
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I am curious if people have a better solution to this problem than I have found.
Often shooting sports in bright sun, portions of the athlete are in deep shadow, which distorts colors pretty badly, making skin tones look grey, and white uniforms blue.
I thought to use Split Toning, but as you can see below it appears to not work well at least with lighter skin and uniforms (since despite being in shadow they are bright).
Here's a multi-image example of what I might do. I'd appreciate advice if there are better ways.
Here's the image straight out of the camera (except cropped):
Notice the blueish uniform and poor skin color.
Here's a bit more pop from my standard global preset and custom profile to match the camera. Uniforms are still blue, skin still off.
So next is the first dead end -- I tried setting a global white balance for the shadows. I took a sample off the socks (the jersey actually does have a bit too much blue in it). And it actually does a reasonable job on the jersey and face. But the background is WAY too warm, just plain yellow.
The below is a subtle change and more important in some shots than others, but I de-saturated the grass a bit and darkened it. How much this is needed depends lot on the angle, as the grass is surprisingly reflective of the sun.
Didn't do anything for the shadows though. So here's an attempt at split tone, though it requires a lot of explanation. I picked red and full saturation so it would appear as something of a mask of where it thought the shadows were. The problem here is that there's no balance setting that works -- the white shirt, ball, and even some of the background is such that before it just starts to be masked (looking at the shirt) WAY too much of the image is also being effected, not just that which is in shadow. I could simply not find a way to do this well, and (in LR anyway) you cannot selectively use split toning, it has to be global (or apparently so).
So I gave up on Split Toning, which is unfortunate as that would be far easier to use than the alternative, where I then painted on an area, used luminance masking in addition, and then added a bit of warmth, brightness, white point and a bit of red tint to get this.
I'm still not very happy with the result, but I think it's better. Or I think so. Here's a side to side comparison at 1:1 zoom.
Now one could argue perhaps I should have used a bit more red, or a bit less yellow, or.... whatever. The global white balance gave better skin I think, but cutting that out and combining would be a photoshop task, and for speed am trying to do this in LR and with the minimal painting-type adjustments I can do.
My question is more basic -- is there a better approach, a better workflow in general? Painting on and trying to mask (using any of the various tools) is a real pain, and not easy if you are doing 40-50 of these at once.
Sure, I can lighten shadows -- but how can I fix the colors in them better than doing it all by hand?
Linwood
Often shooting sports in bright sun, portions of the athlete are in deep shadow, which distorts colors pretty badly, making skin tones look grey, and white uniforms blue.
I thought to use Split Toning, but as you can see below it appears to not work well at least with lighter skin and uniforms (since despite being in shadow they are bright).
Here's a multi-image example of what I might do. I'd appreciate advice if there are better ways.
Here's the image straight out of the camera (except cropped):
Notice the blueish uniform and poor skin color.
Here's a bit more pop from my standard global preset and custom profile to match the camera. Uniforms are still blue, skin still off.
So next is the first dead end -- I tried setting a global white balance for the shadows. I took a sample off the socks (the jersey actually does have a bit too much blue in it). And it actually does a reasonable job on the jersey and face. But the background is WAY too warm, just plain yellow.
The below is a subtle change and more important in some shots than others, but I de-saturated the grass a bit and darkened it. How much this is needed depends lot on the angle, as the grass is surprisingly reflective of the sun.
Didn't do anything for the shadows though. So here's an attempt at split tone, though it requires a lot of explanation. I picked red and full saturation so it would appear as something of a mask of where it thought the shadows were. The problem here is that there's no balance setting that works -- the white shirt, ball, and even some of the background is such that before it just starts to be masked (looking at the shirt) WAY too much of the image is also being effected, not just that which is in shadow. I could simply not find a way to do this well, and (in LR anyway) you cannot selectively use split toning, it has to be global (or apparently so).
So I gave up on Split Toning, which is unfortunate as that would be far easier to use than the alternative, where I then painted on an area, used luminance masking in addition, and then added a bit of warmth, brightness, white point and a bit of red tint to get this.
I'm still not very happy with the result, but I think it's better. Or I think so. Here's a side to side comparison at 1:1 zoom.
Now one could argue perhaps I should have used a bit more red, or a bit less yellow, or.... whatever. The global white balance gave better skin I think, but cutting that out and combining would be a photoshop task, and for speed am trying to do this in LR and with the minimal painting-type adjustments I can do.
My question is more basic -- is there a better approach, a better workflow in general? Painting on and trying to mask (using any of the various tools) is a real pain, and not easy if you are doing 40-50 of these at once.
Sure, I can lighten shadows -- but how can I fix the colors in them better than doing it all by hand?
Linwood
