Digital Darkroom Exercises - Week 2

This is a night-time photo I took of my son playing soccer. It needs a lot of work, so I thought I would use it for this week's techniques. After going through all the commands, with all their different settings, I can see how one could spend a lot of time working on a picture like this, trying different settings. I think the final versions here are big improvements, although this picture will never be great, at least not with my current knowledge and experience. Now having a really fast lens would make a huge improvement on this type of picture. Oh well, wishful thinking.

Here is the original.

This one has been straightened and cropped. Too bad I couldn't get rid of the trashcan in the background.

This one has been lightened, using a histogram adjustment. Here the noise really becomes evident.

Here I applied Digital Camera Noise Removal.

On this version, instead of DCNR, I applied Edge Preserving Smooth. This version and the DCNR version look pretty close to me. I also did a version using Salt and Pepper, but that technique didn't work well at all on this photo, so I didn't include it.

Taking the DCNR version, I applied Unsharp Mask.

Taking the DCNR version again, I applied High Pass Sharpen on this one. I like this version better than the Unsharp Mask, but that may just be due to the settings I picked on each one.