Overcast Issues, suggestions? (Indy Lights Milwaukee Test)

[sadler21]

Went to the Indy Lights test at the Milwaukee Mile yesterday and am struggling with PP on these. The sky was completely overcast leaving most top surfaces reflecting almost completely white. Here are the few best shot from the grandstand with a Sigma 100-300 and 2x TC. Suggestions on how to account for the highlights would be great, Ive tried the shadows/highlights in CS3 with some relative success

[dunganick]

I shoot Jpeg as dont have the card space for Raw, When i have difficult lighting i tend to under expose things. I find the colours easier to sort afterwards with levels. And underexposed images i personally think look better than over exposed.

I then go in and play around with the levels etc....

NICK

[dunganick]

hopefully you dont mind i had a play and this on my uncalibrated moniter looks slightly better:

Overdid the sharpening alot though.

[DC Fan]

Originally Posted by sadler21

Went to the Indy Lights test at the Milwaukee Mile yesterday and am struggling with PP on these. The sky was completely overcast leaving most top surfaces reflecting almost completely white. Here are the few best shot from the grandstand with a Sigma 100-300 and 2x TC. Suggestions on how to account for the highlights would be great, Ive tried the shadows/highlights in CS3 with some relative success

Move the sun or try a different angle.

One of the tough things about sports action work is that you can't always control the light. Those who work night races have been known to carry huge power packs and bare bulb flashes just to resolve an image.

Here's an example from Saturday at the Speedway. Marty Roth in the third turn from the infield at 10:45 a.m. Heavily backlit with the sun directly in line with the car.




There's no force of nature or filters I know of to stop that backlit flare from the car. The solution, from my angle, was to wait a fraction of a second until the car had passed the sun.



Someone else may know of a trick with polarizing filters or something similar, but I'm of the opinion that often you have to adjust technique or angle when something like this happens.

[sadler21]

Originally Posted by dunganick

hopefully you dont mind i had a play and this on my uncalibrated moniter looks slightly better:

Overdid the sharpening alot though.

Nick,

Thanks (and I finally found the "Image editing OK" option!)... may I ask how you did that?

DC Fan, actually, that was the problem if it was just sunny that would have been fine, but it was completely overcast so no matter where I stood it seemed to wash out the sidepod tops and the nose. I would have used a polarizer if I a) had one and b) could use it. Shooting at f/8 at 640 ISO, Im not sure how keen I would be on losing another stop from the polarizer.

[adamsti]

First off, even though it was overcast, you can tell it was still very bright. ISO 640, for what?? Put it on ISO 100 and leave it there.
Most of the time with CS3 you can recover the highlights when you convert the RAW file with ACR, another reason I never shoot jpeg. You can also hold down the control, alt, and tidle, (the squiggly line above the tab key), in CS3, this selects the highlights in your image, next click on select, then click on inverse, this will then select the shadows, or everything but the highlights. Do your levels, or curves adjustments now as these adjustments will not affect your highlights unless you go way to far with them.