Show Us Your Sports Edits - Before and After!

I see lots of these 'before and after' type thread in other areas of POTN, and I thought it might be worthwhile to start something in the Sports section. I think the post-processing requirements of sports shooters is quite a bit different than, say, a portrait photographer, so hopefully others see value a thread like this (if not, let it fade into oblivion...). A lot of time I may only spend 15-20 seconds editing a photo, whereas a landscape photographer friend of mine can spend hours. Some of you may spend even less time (and may even shoot straight JPEG and call it good) and that's cool too.

So show us what you've got! Whether it be a 3 second crop, a 30 second tweak to help the photo "pop" or a full-out hour long photoshop session on a sportrait, I'm interested in seeing what others do so that we can all learn together. Live action, T&I, studio stuff, it's all good, as longs as it's sports related!

So I figured I'd start us off with a baseball example given that baseball season is upon us this year.

For this image, I was shooting a game on a beatiful day; not a cloud in the sky. I was on the third base side of the field and grabbed a quick shot of the catcher in between batters while my background was clean. The sun was coming directly over his right shoulder, so pretty much my choice was to expose for his face and blow out the background and highlights, or underexpose him to protect hightlights (which I did).

1 SOOC, no editing, no cropping

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Here are a couple.

First is one the coach really liked.

SOOC

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Nice! Digging the colors on the first edit. Was that a some sort of blend mode in photoshop or just selective color editing? When I'm not shooting editorial, I sometimes like to throw a soft-light + bw layer on a photo to give it a little more gritty feeling:

1. Photo #5 from above. Copied twice in photoshop. Changed top layer to soft-light. Changed mid layer to black and white. Played around with color balance on black and white layer.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/74405569@N02/8​527109022/

Strouty wrote in post #15673602
Nice! Digging the colors on the first edit. Was that a some sort of blend mode in photoshop or just selective color editing? When I'm not shooting editorial, I sometimes like to throw a soft-light + bw layer on a photo to give it a little more gritty feeling:

Just some selective color editing in lightroom. A desaturated look.

Here's one I posted in the Before and After thread in the Post Processing board:

10 second post process. Just testing out a few things.
Before (1/1250 f/3.5 ISO 500 @ 400mm through a fence):

That's a nice edit Station15.

some good examples here, maybe I should pay more attention to processing

Strouty, Great topic. I'm glad you started this, and will be paying attention to this thread. I think this is going to be very helpful.