Technique Tuesday
Action basketball in low light

The shot:
Before purchasing the Canon 1D mk4, I took it out for some test shots to see if it could produce the quality of image we were after and whether it would handle some of the shooting conditions we sometimes find ourselves in. During the time that we had it I played in a basketball tournament with my brother Adam. I took along the camera and had my sister in law who is into Photography herself shoot some images of the game. This image is of her husband playing. The stadium in Warwick would prove a test in itself being very dark and with horrible lighting. This would be a good test for the camera as when shooting sporting events we require a fast shutter speed. This images was shot using a 24-70mm f2.8 canon lens. The ISO was set to 2000 so it would be good to see how it handled the noise in this dark stadium. The shutter was 1/125 and the aperture f4. The original raw capture was reasonably sharp but definitely needed a little more lift in the overall tone.

Raw Process

In camera raw I found that increasing the Exposure +85, fill light +6 and brightness +56 would bring out the overall exposure and lightness that was more appropriate. Where I was pleased was even with such an increase in the exposure that the noise wasn’t too evident or distracting.

Editing

To keep the exposure level where I wanted it and to bring the detail and zest back into the colour I added a selective colour adjustment layer. Then I increase all of the colours tones individually using their black slider by 10%. By doing this I am darkening making all the colour richer without overdoing the overall contrast and without severely affecting the skin tones and other areas I don’t want to change. Because I use this method fairly often I have saved it and a few of the other selective colour adjustments as presets so when I go to use them its simply a click and its done.

Overall I’m much happier with the image now but I want to isolate some details in the face and other areas so I run my essential dodging and burning action over it (See previous tutorial for technique http://bit.ly/9v72nL). This action makes it so easy and its very customizable to any image. So i very quickly brush in the dodging and burning I want to do and its totally reversable and non destructive. The very last  thing I do to the image is to emphasize the movement. I will go into this in greater detail in another tutorial but in short I select my brother and mask him while adding a touch of motion blur to the background. Now I have a crisp clean and sharp action image.

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