Picture Adjustment

Hi again. It’s been a while since I last posted but with finally becoming a Canadian citizen, Halloween and all the hockey game backlog of pictures I’ve been distracted for a while !

Anyway, I am finally all caught back up and wanted to write a post that I know some of you have been waiting for….my adjustment method. What I describe here works well for the hockey pictures but is quite specific to this category. For other types of scene, a lot of the general principles may be true but the specifics will be different. The primary rule is adjust until your eye tells you you are happy…this is the ultimate test….but using the tools can get you to a good place quite quickly.

My primary workflow for each picture is as follows…

• Crop and Straighten (I will cover this in more detail in another post)
• Adjust Exposure
• Adjust Blacks
• Adjust Shadows
• Adjust Noise Reduction (if required)

• Then repeat for all your selected pictures.

I’ll now walk through each of these, step by step.

Crop & Straighten

Click on the Crop Overlay tool and adjust the framing / straightening as required. I'll talk about this in more detail in a future post.

Adjust Exposure

Adjust the Exposure slide to get the general exposure correct. This is a really important step as often the pictures of the hockey are underexposed based upon cycling of the lights. This can be seen in the histogram where we are trying to move the right hand edge close to the upper edge of the window. We don't want to go right to the edge, but likely most of the way. This often moves the lower edge away from left hand side, which is limiting the black level.

Adjust Blacks

Next we adjust the Black level (the left hand edge of the histogram) by using the Black slider. This is similar to using the Contrast slider but only adjusts the dark levels. By adjusting the Exposure and the Black level we ensure that we use a full dynamic range for the picture. This makes the whites look white and the blacks look black.

Adjust Shadows

The faces of the players are really important to my pictures, but often come out too dark. By using the Shadows slider you can bring up the skin tones that are in shadow in the helmet, without impacting the overall picture too much. Care must be taken with this adjustment though as it will increase the visible noise levels. Adjust it until you find the right balance between making the face more visible and keeping the noise down.

Adjust Noise Reduction

Depending upon the conditions of the rink, the picture may be shown noise. This should be adjusted at this stage, but I will address this in more detail in a later post.

Seeing the end result

In Lightroom you can compare the before and after picture adjustments to see if you prefer the final version with changes that you have made...

Even these simple adjustments can make a big difference to end result output.

The key tool to look at to help to understand these adjustments is the histogram. If we compare the before and after histograms they look like this...

We have ensured that this is adjusted so that the light and dark areas of the picture are well adjusted. For hockey pictures we need to try and get the subject...the skater... adjusted correctly. This may mean that the highlights in other areas (e.g. the ice) get blown out and saturated, but this is not so important. Adjust for the skater and the picture tends to "look right".

This method gets faster the more you do it and with a little practice you can adjust a picture in about 30 seconds.

We'll talk about cropping and noise reduction soon, but it's good to get back to posting!