Photographing Judo: Getting the detail in the Gi

As you will be aware from the previous post, I recently photographed some Judo. It's one of the hardest things I've tried to shoot to date - extremely erratic, fast moving subjects, bad lighting and lots of white. As a result, most of the images came out rather flat; this post outlines a few things I did to coax some life back into my shots, which hopefully you'll find useful next time you find yourself photographing martial arts.

Note: This tutorial assumes you've shot your images RAW and are processing them in lightroom or something similar, and that you know how to use your software of choice. If you aren't concerned with the specifics but would like to see an image reel of each adjustment step, simply scroll to the bottom. If you'd like to see the rest of the Judo pictures, they're here.




For the duration of this post I'll be working with the example image above. It's not the my best shot, but it has plenty of Gi detail in it, which is what this tutorial is (mostly) about, and I did almost exactly the same thing to all the others anyway. To start with, let's take a look at how it looks straight out of camera.

The first thing to do is some small white balance adjustments to make sure the skin tones look nice. The difference is much more subtle than what we're going to do next, but important nonetheless:

Now, the main thing this image is missing is contrast. However, since our subjects are predominantly white, and we're going to brighten them a little in a minute, using the contrast slider in Lightroom is going to result in them being too bright. So instead we'll just pull the blacks back to -50. This, in my opinion, is all the global work the image needs (aside from the next little step, which doesn't really count as global in my option anyway) so we won't touch anything else for now.

I was pretty happy with this image as it is now, with one exception. Gi are (in theory) white, but here they've come out as a kind of blue-grey because of the diffuse sunlight from the high windows (If we shone a floodlight on them, we'd get nice crisp shadows to bring out the details and brilliant white material. Maybe next time...)
(Very luckily, there are no blue objects in this (or any of  the other) images, ignoring the money box in the background which nobody is looking at anyway, so the next thing I did was selectively desaturate all the blue in the image, which at least got rid of the weird colour cast. Quick tip: Want to know which colours are affecting your lovely white gi? Try pushing the saturation all the way up, and it becomes apparent. See right for an example.

So now the gi are a nice muddy grey. I want to do two things at this point: first, brighten them up so they're properly white and second, bring out some of the detail in the folds and texture, which I think looks really cool.
After much experimentation, I ended up using a brush set up as in the picture on the right to enhance the gi, and tweaked it a little for each individual photo. Here's the result:

 This is now basically the finished image. As an afterthought, I grabbed a brush preset I made for enhancing hair and applied it to both the judoka, just for fun. Below is the finished image.

 Finally here's a step-by-step comparison, as otherwise having all the images on screen at once is difficult. Click to see it big.

Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment!