Volleyball Angel 2.8 w/o flash plus Neat Imageby
ph223048Comment: Okay since you ask:
Great focus on main player, insufficient DOF for the logo / name in another plane. As I shoot a lot of high school sports in poorly lit gyms too - I feel your pain.
Agree - it seems much too much Neat Image - her face is plastic, mannequin-like and background peoples faces now draw attention instead of deflecting it.
Looks like you used NI sharpening on the whole image - not a good idea if the background is something you "don't care about" - it affects the image negatively.
My normal workflow for high school gyms, Volleyball, Basketball is:
Stay in 16-bit mode when bringing RAW images in.
Turn off all exposure/brightness/sharpening/color noise reduction defaults. Only color temperature correction should be done - so that all images are uniform.
In PS:
First NI the image without sharpening (always use a custom profile for each shoot no auto profiling).
Smooth no more than 70% on L channel - 60% or 50% is better, 100% on A and B may be acceptable. Leave some luminence grain - it's okay.
Adjust levels, color correct, contrast and saturation, dodge and burn, and possibly final color correction. This image is a tad green-faced from the gym lights.
Now convert to 8-bit mode but only if you are saving to the web or for screen shots or must have jpg insead of psd.
Last step: selectively sharpen main character using good sharpening techniques (an easy but perhaps simplistic is: convert to L-a-b, sharpen L channel only as appropriate (usually 2-steps 150% at 0.3 radius for Canon 10D / 20D or Rebles then ~60% at 2-3 pixels), convert back to RGB).
Clean up edges of selection area with history (multiple swipes at 25% and perhaps some blurring).
The name "Canyon Eagles" you'll need to work on selectively a lot more because of the poor DOF at f/2.8 - the blur is particularly distracting (another reason NI sharpening of whole image insufficient).
FYI, "Canyon Eagles" makes it look like a hand-held shot at 75 mm and not very steady (not image stabilized). Blur is not uniform to my eye -therefore distracting.
Additional tips:
I prefer to increase speed to 1/350 for high school usually at the expense of ISO but have resorted to 1/250 for static shots. High School athletes are generally quite a bit slower than college kids so you don't usually need to get to 1/500 sec which is desired for college Volleyball, Basketball.
If you don't mind - one more tip - always keep the ball in the shot. A little blur on it is sometimes okay to give a sense of motion. It almost always adds significant interest to the shot. May or may not help this one.
Photographer found comment helpful.
