Johanna Loc: Albuquerque, NM

Saturday night I photographed a hafla (belly dance show) in a restaurant with lots of dim celling lights casting a orange glow. My seat was right up front and really to close but that is what it is! I used a D750 with a Tamron f2.8 24-70 lens. The dancers move about quickly thus it's a grab as you can situation. I edit with ACDsee ver 9 in raw format. Starting with 197 pictures, 40 were selected for editing but used only 31. About one out of six! Step 1) Down load all picture to a directory, Those that I want to edit are moved to a sub directory. 2) crop/rotate, 3) exposure/fill light, 4) color EQ for orange cast, 5) noise reduction, 6) save as jpg then copy/export those to a sub directory in a 600 X 450 format for web publishing. I'd appreciate any thoughts on better management.

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Haydon

As a start, custom white balance & a speedlight when you can afford it. Your ISO will be majorly dropped using a speedlight and don't forget the most important, lots of practice. There is no better experience in becoming better.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Johanna,

I am not that familiar with ACDSee, but I don't think there are any issues with your workflow. I went to their website, and see that they now have ACDSee 20, with a cataloging and digital asset management component, presumably making it a little more like Lightroom. Rather that offer a critique on your workflow, I will list the steps in mine, using Lightroom below, so you can compare.

This is not an easy setting to get great images - low light, fast moving subjects, etc. On the first image I noticed you used ISO 8000 and 1/80 sec and F2.8. Clearly you were at the limits of what could be done on that end.

On the other hand, 31 out of 197 is a pretty good rate. That's why you shot 197.

So, as Haydon suggested, white balance and lighting are issues. What I have done in the past is set up several speedlights in a room like this to mimic the ambient light by placing them in and around existing lighting fixtures, or in two corners firing into the corner and use radio triggers. This will provide a more pleasing light, allow you to use the speedlight's flash duration to freeze action, and instead of ISO 8000, and F2.8 you could use ISO 800 and F5.6 or F8, and better control over the white and color balance.

To my eye, the images you posted still have quite an "orangey" look to them.

In settings like this I like to use an Xrite ColorChecker Passport, to take a reading of the lighting and create a custom camera profile. This is a great video on how it works and why it would be perfect in this setting. Since you are shooting raw there is no need to do a custom white balance in camera. Using a gray card to do a CWB may not pick up on the other coloring in the setting, and though you're white balance may be on target, you still may have a color balance (green-magenta) issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDtebpvATzc

My workflow for your shoot assuming I am not setting up any lighting would go something like this:

1. Arrive at the venue, take some test shots of my ColorChecker Passport for use later to create several camera profiles.
2. Shoot the job.
3. Import images into my computer and LR, rate them with stars and/or colors - I use one folder - which has a descriptive name and the date of the shoot. The prefix of the folder name has a number used as an index, so I don't necessarily have to open LR to find my images.
4. Once i have made my selections, I create the camera profile(s), and I apply the profile to the images using the sync feature in the Develop Module.
5. I then make adjustments as you did, for shadows and highlights, noise, sharpening, and in this case, I might apply a radial filter to add some extra brightness to the dancers. The room is pretty dark, but in your images you lose that quality - I might try to reproduce that, though it would be a lot of work, because each one must be done individually.
6. With all my edits complete, and if the quality of a raw conversion is adequate, (I usually take my images into Photoshop for finishing), I use an export preset to create 600x450 jpegs, sRGB color space. The preset creates a new folder within the raw image folder called Small Jpgs. When they get to their destination, I delete my jpegs.

On a job like this, I might complete my edits on 40 images in about 90 minutes or so, including downloading, evaluating, selecting, and individual treatment, and final export. If there were some that required more attention, I might add about an extra 5-10 minutes for each one of those.

The workflow is similar to yours, but I keep only one, or possibly two copies of my image - the raw file (with it's edits in the LR preview and an xmp sidecar file), and a working copy with the raw edits in the form of a 16 bit PSD file if I choose to edit in Photoshop.

The cost of ACDSee with maintenance is comparable to the Photoshop/Lightroom subscription - I would suggest you look into it, but that is my personal bias. If you are good and fast with ACDSee, there is probably no reason to change.

I've attached an image, the first shows the result of using speedlights to augment room lighting, and the second is the uncropped version which shows where they lights were - in this case in the chandeliers. I used 1/80, F5.6 ISO 800. The speedlights were set to 1/4 power, so I could make it through the entire 4 hour event without needing to replace batteries.

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Johanna Loc: Albuquerque, NM

Thank you for the quick & informative reply. My original thoughts were not to “disturbed” the enjoyment of the show or “confuse” the dancers with a flash in their eyes. I like your idea of placing strobes in the ceiling fixtures. In this room I guess the ceiling is 11 or 12 feet high. The lights were added via conduit (look at 1st pix). Perhaps some grip clamps could be used to hold Speedlight’s aimed at the two corners over the end where I’d be shooting from. These would, for the most part, not disturb people. I could also set up my 300 LED Yongnuo battery powered lights. They have IR control and with two mounted batteries last almost 3 hours. It’s a constant light and probably not disturbing but not as intense. Getting up there for this old 86 yr. lady is another problem.
The color checker will be used next time I shoot there. I have older versions of Lightroom & Photoshop but just have been overwhelmed with them. Guess, maybe, ought to or just dig in and learn to use them.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Looks like a fun night, and your workflow seems good.

G_Manos Loc: Bala Cynwyd, PA

Johanna - Your work flow seems fine, and if it works for you, stick with it until you have to change it. Your use of the term "directory" means you go back to command line computing, welcome to the (shrinking) crowd!

On the color issue, I suspect that the yellowish walls have a lot to do with the off-color white balance, since you did not use a flash. Those who suggest use of a speedlight are giving you good advice, try it next time. Fire the speedlight at the ceiling, possibly pointing it behind you a bit (this requires experimentation), thus avoiding shining the light into the performers' eyes. You will be surprised at how much light this will put on your subject. Turn down the ISO to somewhere between 100 and 400 to start (at the distances in this scene) to eliminate as much of the ambient light as practical, and the speedlight will take care of the rest. And, as others have noted, the flash will freeze the action, giving you some latitude on exposure.

Also, using multiple flashes is OK but not necessary, particularly if you are experimenting. It's best to take one step at a time when pursuing lighting alternatives so you can see the effect of each step. FWIW.

-George-