How many times have you gone out and done a session, gotten home and realized just how horrible the background of the session was? This was honestly not something that I had ever encountered until recently. In previous posts I have been discussing the session that I did with my son's wrestling team. We were unable to shoot their session in the school gym that has a beautiful floor and great lighting, and were forced to shoot in the wrestling room. A room that has ten different types of light bulbs that do not all work, and lets be real, it looked and smelled like a sweaty man cave. There were no real places for me to shoot, so I had to make do with what I had and that was not much. At first I was not super concerned, and then the parents started to talk. They told me how grateful they were that I was doing this, and that I was taking my time out for the boys when the school half the time forgot to send the normal photographer, and that there were years that the whole team was left out of the yearbook. I was appalled. I couldn't believe that the school treated these kids like red headed step children. It didn't make sense to me that the school failed to take care of a team that is ranked number two in the region, and has five or six members ranked at the state level. So this changed the game for me. I wanted to give them something special and something that they could be proud of. Something that they could showcase and show that they were wrestlers and that was something to be proud of, not that they were the red headed step children of the school. So I had a lot of work ahead of me.
Knowing that I had literally nothing to work with, I thought that I could make some adjustments in Lightroom and everything would be OK, but in just in case I took a background shot before I started with the team.
This is what I had to work with. On either side there are cement columns and just no real room to move around and work. The parents told me that when they occasionally do get a photographer that is where the kids stand and they take their photos. I was in shock. I knew that I had to do something. So when got home I went to work. I actually ended up building three different backgrounds.
The first background:
As you can tell there is not a huge change. I increased the vibrance of the yellow, and dropped the warmth of the over all photo and made several adjustments to the white balance, and than I added a vignette to the photo in hopes of making the cement columns on either side of the V disappear.
The second background:
This was built off of the first. In the first background I did not like the bricks and the columns that stood out. Also there are areas that are damaged that I could not hide, so I thought that it would be best to go a bit darker in hopes to try and hide the deformities that I could not remove from the background. So what I did was took the photo into Photoshop and added an exposure layer to blacken out the bricks, but removed it and also enhanced the V a bit, and tried to enhance the reflection of the V on the mat underneath the V, one to give the background depth, and two to give it a different look from other photos that I had seen. I will admit that I was not a huge fan of how dark this is, but there was no way that I could clone stamp or heal, or even content aware fill all that was wrong in the background. I will admit that I wish that I could have made the floor a bit lighter, however I could not for the life of me get Photoshop to cooperate on this and make it happen. And as I am still learning masking and overlays and layers as a whole, it was a struggle to get this far.
After creating the second background I realized that there was still imperfections that I still had not eliminated from the background. There was damaged wall under the V and I was not sure that I could fix that or hide it. I tried on multiple attempts, yet failed. So my next idea was to create one more background.
The third background:
With this background I decided that the only way to get this right was to take everything out but the floor. So I took the exposure layer and extended it down to the floor line to hide the last of the imperfections that I could see in the photo. I then went to the school website and downloaded the school logo. This logo was on a white background. So i uploaded it into Photoshop and removed the V from the white background using the quick selection tool. Once I had selected everything I needed I used the drag tool and moved it to my background and positioned it in the corner of the photo. I then took the clone stamp tool and "copied the reflection from the original V to match under the new one that I had created. Once that was done, I darkened the exposure on the original reflection with a brush and desaturated it. I also used the healing brush to blend the change into the mat and make it look as though nothing was there. Once that was complete I was able to flatten my image and begin the process of moving players into the various backgrounds.
The placement of the wrestlers into the backgrounds was not that difficult. All it really required was the use of the quick selection tool and the move tool. There of course was some resizing of each wrestler to make everything look balanced. But over all a very workable, but time consuming process.
Now that you have seen what I did I would love to know how you would do this! I am still learning how to edit every day and any tricks and tips to making editing in Photoshop and Lightroom easier is always great! Please leave your tips and tricks in the comments. I look forward to talking to all of you.
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