Event: Independence Day Classic and Daylight Photography
Living in Arizona, we get just about the greatest amount of sunlight I’ve ever seen. It’s so good in fact, that it can be a challenge, especially when you’re shooting colors that fall all across the spectrum from bright white stripes to full black uni’s. Couple that with faces under the shadow of helmets, and the dynamic range of your camera just can’t cover it all.
Everyone has different ways of dealing with this. For some it’s a matter of exposing properly, and then bringing up the shadows in post process, either with something like the Fill Light tool in ACR, or Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop. Using these tools have their problems, as bringing up shadows also brings up image noise. It can also look unnatural if used improperly.
Another method is to expose for the face of the subject, letting the chips fall where they may on the rest of the exposure. Caveats here include nuclearizing your subject’s white uniform, or radiating the entire field if it’s a bright color. Fun fun.
Over the weekend I was shooting the Arizona USSSA Independence Day Classic, a fastpitch softball tournament held over in Pinetop, AZ. With start times of noon, though, getting the entire range of an image captured was difficult. Read on to find out what I did to combat this, from steps I took in the camera, to an action I made in Photoshop that helped with post process. Oh and it’s a downloadable action. =)
Depending on what camera you use, you’ll have a variety of options available to you in order to squeeze the most dynamic range out of your camera. The first and most obvious thing you can do is to shoot RAW. Lots of advantages here, mainly the ability to adjust white balance in post, and having between 12-14 bits of image data to work with. But shooting RAW also means a huge file increase. While most 10mp jpegs are 3-4mb, RAW files can easily be 10-12mb. This increase adds up quickly. I typically shoot 500 or more images per game for youth sports, and that would be 2gb in jpegs, but 6gb in RAW files. Multiply that by the 20 or so games covered over the weekend, and we now are looking at 120gb of storage. While this isn’t a big deal to some, for others, that added overhead can be an encumbrance.
So, what if you just shoot Jpeg, what then? For one, I would reccomend shooting Adobe RGB, but only if you understand now that you must convert to sRGB later, and know what that entails. Viewing an Adobe RGB image on a web browser is a hit or miss proposition and you may get color errors and overall flat color. But using Adobe RGB gives you a wider color gamut. That means that colors that might fall out of the range of what sRGB can “see” may still fall into Adobe RGB. By keeping that information, you can later edit that image with more accuracy. BTW, if you shoot RAW, colorspace isn’t important, as you can do this after the fact.
Newer cameras offer in camera adjustments to help with dynamic range. Nikon offers D-Lighting, which is an adjustable setting that fills in shadows in camera for every image. Not only can you do that as part of the image setting, but you can also edit images after you’ve taken them, and add D-Lighting to them. Nifty.
Canon offers Highlight Tone Priority. It basically shoots an image at a lower ISO than stated, but renders out the image processed properly, keeping the highlights from blowing out. By doing so, you can shoot a little brighter than usual, without blowing out highlights as easily.
Cameras offer different color looks, such as neutral, vivid, portrait, landscape, etc. These images adjust colors and tonality. Since this is all a formula for adjusting certain colors, the adjustment may end up hurting your image. Go with a setting like Neutral, that offers little to no adjustment.
Now you’ve got a pretty basic baseline image to edit, but how to process them?
It may sound crazy, but using noise reduction on your image can be really beneficial, even on low ISO images. This is because, as you edit your image, you will be bringing up your shadows, and doing brightness adjustments, and those effects will be most prevalent in your shadows, which also contains the noise in any image. Here’s a common trick: First change your image to 16-bit mode in photoshop, then use noise reduction. Because you’re working with a larger bit space, any formulas (such as noise reduction) applied to the pixels (which are just number values for colors) will have a larger range of numbers to fall on (after they’re adjusted). Remember, you need that lattitude as you make all your adjustments.
As I stated before, you could use the Shadow/Highlight tool to adjust your images, and it’s pretty effective, but it has it’s issues. For one, it’s not an adjustment layer, so once you save the image, you can’t really undo it. Sure, you can duplicate your layer, but if you don’t like the effect it has on certain parts of the image, you’ll have to use a mask to edit that out.
So, in playing around with a few images, I tried to find a simpler, more automated way to do all this. As I’ve stated before, I’m a huge fan of actions, and have a few articles on the topic. Anytime I can automate a process, I save time, and ultimately that means I can either get my work done faster, or get more work done in the same time. Either way, it’s a win win. In this case, I took 11 steps, and turned it into one shortcut (F4)
You may notice that it says crop, 16 bit, and Noise Ninja in the history pallete. These are not part of my action, as cropping and your noise reduction of choice are all personal preferences. As for 16 bit, just make sure you try that before whatever noise reduction you choose. There are plenty of choices for noise reduction. A few popular ones include Noiseware, Neat Image, Noise Ninja, and others. Some offer free trials, or even free editions that have feature limitations (the killer here is that most of the free versions often limit themselves to 8-bit images only).
On the left here, you’ll see the result of the action. It will maintain your original image as is, but create a separate shadow layer with its own adjustment layer, as well as an adjustment layer for the original, and a hue/saturation adjustment for the entire composition. Since it’s all adjustment layers, you can double click on them and change the settings. If you hide all the layers, you can see the original as is. One thing I noticed after all the adjustments and layers was a bump in saturation. I added a simple hue/saturation adjustment in order to tone it down. You can adjust this to taste as well.
Instructions are simple. Download the action, and install. Hit F4 to invoke the action. Preferably do this on images that are shot in daylight, and try to do this on images that are 16 bit.
If you need further assistance with the action, please feel free to email me (the link is on the sidebar on the right).
The action can be downloaded by clicking on the link below. The name is addon, because it’s only a single action, and I intend to add it onto my PShizzy Action Set 2:
Oh, and I have a small gallery of images from the tournament. All in all, it was a great time. One last tip: If clouds do show up (which they almost never do in Arizona), shoot as much as possible! Cloud cover is like a big softbox for the sun. Use it to your advantage.
The gallery may be seen at:
Thanks Max, helps out my photos quite a bit.
Thx!
Zander
Starting the masks of the two curve adjustment layers at 50% gray (RGB of 128/128/128) lets you start with a shot that looks a lot like the original, then you can “paint in” your highlight and shadow recovery with the white/black brushes on the masks.
Max, I shoot in the desert all the time. I will give this a try and report back. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Thanks
I will try this.
Awesome site, I think I found my summer reading. I am a very amateur photographer. I love the action shots, but my skill and camera both need to be upgraded.
Cool I am trying this. I am thinking I can use this technique on portraits done during a sunny day in Good Old El Paso, not as hot as phoenix but sunny as phoenix.!!!!