I agree with toning down the Neat Image a bit. I think the player looks good. It's a shame the logo isn't sharp but shooting in low light with shallow DOF is always gonna affect that! Good effort though!
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.
Great shot, I like the perspective you used to get around eye level with her. I think that the composition may be improved if the negative space were to the right, so that she would be looking into the image more rather then looking out of it (like you have here). Personally, I think that it looks over neat imaged, and looks like it could be rotated a tad clockwise, but excellent job with the lighting situation you were in, and nice capture of the moment.
ive shot a volly ball game with the exact same equipment as you have and none of mine turned out that good, even after post processing
goor job the softness that neat image made makes it look great
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