Video Training for Sports Photographers

So I shoot 2k RAW images at a sporting event, I use a culling software to get that down to 400, Now walk me through how I use my newly aquired DXO Photolab 8 to batch process them into a noise reduced perfectly color adjusted folder full of JPG files ready to upload onto my website!!!

For my sports sets (similar numbers but I only output up to 70 finished images), I create presets which suit my images. I apply the presets to a new set and then tweak.

When I have matching RAW images (same exposure, white balance), I then copy good corrections to the next image and then tweak. Out of seventy images, there’s probably about ten core corrections, the rest would be light tweaks to one of those ten corrections.

If you’re less fussy, apply a preset, correct a single image. Then copy those corrections and apply them to all the images (except for crop, which for sport, you’ll have to make separately for each image).

PS. Oh and make sure that you only take the 400 keepers into PhotoLab in a separate folder. A folder including 2000
lower rated images in it will be slow and unwieldy, slowing down the image browser.

Same workflow here for indoor sports. Getting the right WB is often a problem. It’s all high ISO work, so using Loupe speeds-up the process in PL8, compared to PL7. I think most of my processing time is image selection :wink:
Unlike Alec, I don’t have any problems with keeping initially large number of raws in a directory – that’s usually 1k-4k per session. But I’m on Win11 and a rather high-end PC.

EDIT: In some cases I use color labels to group photos, either based on subject or lighting conditions. It can make fine-tuning or exporting to different directories or with different filename suffix much easier – you can filter by color. If you’ll be fine-tuning on groups of selected photos, develop a habit of deselecting them as soon as possible, otherwise you’ll have to learn it by bad experience :slight_smile:

1 Like

I set these habits several versions of PhotoLab ago, on an Intel Mac. Recent versions of PhotoLab may be better, and the Apple Silicon Macs are all about five to ten times more powerful than any Intel Macs (outside of the last 24 and 28 core Mac Pros). So perhaps that rule is not as important. I prefer to keep the non-keeper files in their own folder.

For a few years, I’ve marked most non-keeper files as 1 star (FastRawViewer) and delete them within a week of the event. That reduces hard drive space requirements and backups by two-thirds but still leaves hundreds of photos form which to choose.

Indoor white balance is tough with artificial light. Usually outdoors even with the sun setting, there’s only about three or for white balances to worry about during the course of an event. I try to make some good white balances and copy those out to similar photos (part of the ten master images for every set).