Two weeks in a row! I'm on a roll. Kaiser please. Anywho...
For this photo I was directing my valuable assistant and VAL (voice activated light) to cast a little light their direction. It was getting pretty late, nearly 8:30 pm, and being in a dugout, I needed the assist to keep the faces out of shadow. In retrospect, I could have (should have?) put a reflector behind her to pop a little more light onto his face. As it goes though, I like the result as her laughing expression is really the point and that's where the light falls. I made a few adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW to crop a tiny bit and straighten for better composition. In Photoshop I decided to just "play" with this photo and tried a whole lot of different things. In the end the stuff I kept were a black and white adjustment layer that I lowered to tone the color down, Topaz Adjustment filter on "Photo Pop", lowered to 75%, a warm photo filter for, yea, you guessed it, warmth, highlight and shadow separator actions from TRA actions, highlight recovery in Photoshop, a bit of noise reduction on the blue channel in LAB mode, and finally the Lux (soft) action at 90%, also from TRA. Phew, that's a lot, and not something I would do for a whole event's worth of photos, but it was fun to play around and do something a little different.
