Earlier this week, I captured a quick snapshot of the Home Run Derby finalists for our Pony baseball league. The challenge was dealing with very harsh light. Harsh light combined with the baseball caps created some very dark shadows. Fortunately, Adobe's Lightroom 4 does a nice job recovering the highlights and shadows within an image.

Here is the original picture:

Home Run Derby's Final Four

Within Lightroom's Develop Module, I dropped the Highlights (-71) and boosted the Shadows (+69):

Further, I added some Clarity (+24), dropped the Luminance of the Yellow (-51), Green (-10), Aqua (-18) and Blue (-35) channels, applied some sharpening and enabled lens correction. Then, I brought the image into Photoshop CS5 for further retouching: cloning out the posts, selectively applying the Color Efex Detail Enhancer filter, adding a touch of the Topaz Adjust Vibrance filter (30% opacity), converting the image to B&W and reducing the opacity (90% opacity) slightly to let a little color bleed through and finally applying a frame and text.

Home Run Derby's Final Four (framed and titled)