Original image:
Anchorage, Alaska, Sled Dog Sprint Races
ISO 400, 210mm, f/5.6, 1/3200 sec.
I took this photo with a bit higher ISO as I didn’t know how quickly the dogs would be rushing by and I wanted to make sure that I had a high shutter speed, to freeze the motion of the dogs. It was also spotty light, sometimes shaded, sometimes sunny- I’m sure I could have gotten by at ISO 200, but you live and learn…
How I improved this photo:
1. Cropped to get a closer focus on dogs.
2. Moved up the contrast, while raising the recovery and the fill light– a bright day with sun and lots of snow and I didn’t want to lose the details.
3. Changed the white balance to the “daylight” setting, which moved the light spectrum away from the cold blue tones and more into the warm yellows.
4. I then went to HSL, which allows you to work on saturation and luminance for individual colors, to lower the blue tones. Even with the white balance change all the shadows were still showing up blue, so I essentially eliminated that color from the photo. I also lowered the purples and magentas, so that the girl’s jacket off to the side did not stand out and distract the eye quite so much.
Final image:
A side note: I have this crazy tendency to crop, crop, crop- which I originally did with this image, but then I decided that I liked some of that external information like the viewers and the trail so I did a re-do. How do you know when you’re cropping out too much and when to resist the crop?