Before-and-After Sportrait: UO Tennis

Monday I gave you another preview of the photo I created for the University of Oregon’s Women’s Tennis poster and Wednesday I posted how the composite was built. Today, I thought I’d show a little before and after of one of the individual portraits making up this composite. Like I mentioned last week in the Step-by-Step Acrobatics and Tumbling Composite, the background goes through the same “HDR toning” that my Sportraits go through.

When I started out, the processing techniques that I was using were what I learned from Joel Grimes at one of his workshops. But, like everything in life, my processing began to grow and morph as a result of other techniques I picked up along the way. I always put HDR toning in quotes because it’s by no means even close to creating a HDR image but it follows along the same principles. I open up the image and try to bring in the largest amount of dynamic range that I can before adding on a bunch of contrast.

I mentioned earlier in the week that the composite took somewhere around 20-hours to create. When working on something like this I don’t spend as much time on the portrait processing. I try to create something that has the same dramatic look but doesn’t take a ton of steps for two main reasons. One, just purely based upon time. If I spent 2 or 3 hours on each individual portrait in this composite we are looking at around 20 hours before I get into everything else that is needed to blend a composite (in this case the motion blur, background, and shadows). Two, you obviously want to match the portraits as best as you can so the composite actually stays consistent throughout.

Here’s one of the individual portraits used in the composite in a before and after slider. I’m still working out the kinks in this program so the two pictures don’t line up perfectly but you will still get a good idea of the change between the two.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 6:00 AM. It is filed under Blog and tagged with Before-and-After, Composite, Sportrait, Sports, Tennis, University of Oregon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.