Brutal evaluations sought! (partII)

[xtm]

http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r236/TitusvileSurfer/IMG_noref.jpg

I Love it!!! Very good composition-wise, it draws your attention to the guy that's running with the ball while the other guys duke it out. Very ESPN-esque I may add. The ref wouldn't be too bad but he's directly behind the main subject, and he's wearing a white uniform which makes it distracting. This would make for a very nice 20x30 print.

 

[TitusvileSurfer]

Doug, I really appreciate the pointers and action! Unfortunately I have Photoshop 7 and can't use smart objects. We used CS3 in a photography class I took and learned all about them there. It really makes me fell inadequate. I'll have to use my student discount to pony up for CS4...or should I get Aperture 3?

I digress, I took your advice with the "screen" and it really helped. You were even dead on with the 50% opacity as 40% wasn't quite enough and 60% blew out the white jersey beyond acceptable bounds. I tried a trial and error sharpening procedure involving unsharp mask, dust & scratches, and gaussian blur. In the procedure I used individual masked layers to target noise and sharpen edges. You can't really see it in this re-size but the fruits of my labor seem worth it:

If the image looks blurred compared to previous examples, it is because all sharpening was done before resizing. The full size image seems sharper than previous attempts and without question has much less noise. You can certainly see the screen effect in this example, and I added 2x 4 radi Gaussian blurs to the background (including the ref) to try and clear the noise back there. Background noise in the sky substantially increased after the brightness adjustment, as expected.

Oops I just realized I shaved the ref's head, and not for locks of love.

 

[username in use]

Looks good, my only issue is the incredible disolving referees head.

 

[BlueCorn]

Other than fixing the ref's head, the only other thing that I'd consider is leveling the horizon.

 

[b16drag]

Pic is a bit dull... Gotta make it POP more. Try increasing the brightness and contrast a bit.

 

[swjim]

Pic is a bit dull... Gotta make it POP more. Try increasing the brightness and contrast a bit.

He might be able to bump the saturation but those uniforms are pretty dark, I think if he increases the contrast much he's going to lose the shadow detail.

 

[TitusvileSurfer]

Oh my gosh I didn't even think about the horizon. I got so caught up in the big things I forgot the basics. -_- Thanks for pointing that out Doug. I messed with the contrast in Lab Lightness but ended up discarding it. Like swjim pointed out, it undid the gains of the brightening.
Final draft?:

100% crop:

Original edit 100% crop:

 

[jbray84]

I had to laugh when I saw that my alma mater still sucks in football. Sting 'em Scorps. Nice shot by the way.

 

[TitusvileSurfer]

Thanks Final score was 6-21 (Astronaut) I think I got some decent shots of them if your interested though.

The Cocoa Tigers took the cake this year beating Astronaut 28 to 3 in regular season and then again 29 to 0 in the playoffs. They were unstoppable, but when aren't they? Cocoa beach on the other hand lost to Astronaut 56 to 6, and their defense scored the 6 points due to an error they didn't even cause. Then they missed the field goal...and it was all at home. I felt really bad for all their fans. ahahaha