April 2024 Best in Monochrome Category
The boxer was one of our students when we taught the military kids for the Department of Defense schools in Stuttgart, Germany. She was a always a great kid and very athletic. We have stayed a little bit in touch with her, as we have with many of our former students, through Facebook. She has been a boxer her whole life but when she started there weren’t many women and she had to convince one of the gym’s in her area to train her. Over her career she has won several world titles. With winning this one she also will go into the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest female welterweight title holder. We went up to see her fight in Tampa. What we didn’t know was that her fight was the featured fight of the evening and we had to sit through all the other fights to see her bout. Hers was the only female fight that night. The fights started at 7 PM and as the featured fight it was the last one of the evening and as a result it didn’t start until 1 AM. It was a 10 round fight and went the full 10 rounds and was decided by decision. It was close but all 3 judges picked her as the winner so she won the belt. It was great to be able to see her win. I printed a large copy of the picture, framed it and we went up to Plant City, FL, where she lives, to give it to her. We had a great evening and dinner with her reminiscing about her school days and what she has been up to.
Here’s how I processed this image:
- Took photo into Topaz for sharpening and denoise.
- Used lens adjustment button in Lightroom to adjust
for my lens. - Clicked on auto adjust in Lightroom to see what it
did, it was OK but decided I needed to make manual
adjustments as well. - In Lightroom I cropped the picture to get rid of the
ring rope and focus more on her face. Actually, I had
to do additional cropping throughout process to get
exact focal point I wanted as I changed things. - Used the heal brush in Lightroom to get rid of a lot of
little white dots in the picture, not sure if dust on my
lens or an effect of the indoor lighting. - Used a linear gradient to do a general adjustment of
highlights on the back of the other boxer on the left
side. - Used a radial adjustment on the boxer’s face for the
same reason. - Used Mask 1 in Lightroom on the boxer’s face and
used sliders to adjust Blacks, whites exposure and
highlights as the glare from overhead lights was quite
bright on her face. - Used Mask 2 on specific areas of her face and further
adjusted blacks, whites and highlights and then
further adjusted using shadows and contrast sliders. - Used Mask 3 to adjust shadows and exposure
sliders on other boxer’s back to cut down brightness. - Changed photo to B/W to see if I liked it better than
color. I did but wanted to enhance aspects of that so
went back to color and then used color sliders to
adjust color levels adjusting green/gray, blue/gray,
yellow/gray, orange/gray and red/gray. - Used Mask 4 to further adjust exposure, whites and
highlights. - Changed picture back to black and white.
- Used Mask 5 and sliders to adjust white, highlights
and exposure on boxer’s face. - Used Mask 6 and sliders to adjust highlights,
whites, exposure, black, contrast dehaze, texture and
clarity on specific areas of boxer’s face.