07/03/2026
Managed to catch my first Port Melbourne "Sharks" Soccer Club home VPL1 game Friday night. Gotta love the summer fixtures - a sunset, shorts and a t-shirt ! There are some samples attached - the full gallery is at:
https://www.robcruse.com.au/Sport/Soccer/PMSC/2026/PMSC-Snr-v-Western-United
For anyone thats interested, I've been evolving my processing workflow. Here is the current setup. For reference, the night images (second half of the game under lights) are shot at ISO 12,800 so they are pretty muddy, even on a Nikon Z9.
So this is my processing workflow.... Most of the Lightroom stuff is in presets so it runs pretty much by itself. The files start as .NEF's (Nikon Raw).
__________________________________
1 - Dump cards into Photo Mechanic and make selections. Keep roughly 1 image in 10 for sport (1200 down to about 120).
2 - Process the selections through DxO PureRaw6 to a DNG file. This removes pretty much all the noise. This takes about an hour to do 100 images (you don't need to sit and watch it).
3 - Open the DNG's in Photo Mechanic and crop (could also do this step in Lightroom Classic but I prefer PM's cropping to LR).
4 - Import the noise reduced, cropped DNG's into a new folder in LR, and tell it to import the crops (LR won't automatically recognise the crop otherwise).
5 - In LR Apply Profile : Port Melbourne colour balance. This is a stored temperature and tint (white balance) thats applied to all images to compensate for the colour cast of the floodlights. For this ground I use 4500K / 24. This gets partially backed out for the earlier images that weren't under lights.
6 - Apply Profile : Adaptive Colour (amount 70%).
7 - Apply Profile : Select Background & apply colour temp -5, exposure -0.35.
8 - Apply Profile : Select Subject & apply colour temp +5, exposure +0.25, Texture 7, Clarity 15, Dehaze 10
9 - Apply Profile : Blacks -10, Vignette -5
__________________________________
5-9 are all done in bulk (to all 120 pics at once). All up these automations take about 10 mins. Several of the steps use AI and compare different images in the folder to get consistency (I think this step takes the most time).
All images are stored on an external flash drive (2TB) connected to a Macbook Air (M4 version) via USB. The images never actually get onto the Mac's internal drive. Both Photomechanic and Lightroom work directly off the USB drive.
After the game all images are deleted other than the final version that makes its way to Lightroom. i.e. the 90% of images that didn't get selected never get saved beyond maybe a week.
