Fixing Football Shots Partially in the Shade
Yesterday, in my post about my first football shoot of the year (link), I mentioned that if some of the players wind up in the shade, that I remove the blue tint that appears over anything white (like their jerseys, helmet, the stripes on the ball, and so on) in Lightroom (or Camera Raw). Anyway, I had a few questions about it, so I thought I post a quick tutorial. Here goes:
Above: Here’s a great illustration of the problem: when the team winds up on a part of the field that’s covered in shadows (as seen here), their white jerseys (and anything white for that matter) get a deep blue tint over them. However, you can see from the photo, that in a few seconds part of the team will be running in the daylight in front of them, which puts part of the image in shade, and part in daylight, which creates the double-white balance problem).
STEP ONE: In Camera Raw (shown here) or in Lightroom’s Develop Module, get the Adjustment Brush, then over in the Adjustment Brush panel on the right side, lower the Saturation amount a bit (as seen here), and set everything else to zero. Now, with the Auto Mask checkbox turned on, start painting over the white parts of the player’s jersey’s (here’s I’m painting over #67’s jersey and pants, and you can see the blue is going away as I paint.
STEP TWO: Continue painting over anything that’s tinted blue (here I painted over all three players in white, but to finish this off, I’d have to paint over the “5” on #5’s jersey as well. Now go and compare that with the image at the top of this post and you’ll really see the difference.
STEP THREE: Of course, since they’re in the shade, the whole image is really dark, so you might want to increase the Fill Light quite a bit, and the Exposure a little bit (as seen here), so the players aren’t “in the dark..”
(Above: Here’s the typical type of shot you’d have to apply this technique to—where part of the action is in daylight [one white balance] and part is in shade [they look too blue]. If they all stayed in the shade, you could just change the overall white balance, but for some reason you can’t get these guys to stay put. ;-) ).
That’s all there is to it. Hope that helps.