GREAT SHOTS WITH BAD LIGHTING AND KEEPING THE ACTION

I have done a tutorial about layer blends before and the one in the demo there is not a great difference in the before and after. Here is one that is. At a high school game with the worst lights I have ever seen on one end of the field I took the following picture. Now keep in mind that this was set to ISO 1250 on a 40D with a f/2.o 135 prime and it was at f/2. I wanted to keep the action so I set the Shutter Speed to 500. The first is the original shot.

When I brought it into photoshop I did a duplicate layer and with the levels brightened it until everything was seen clearly>ok> I then went to the layer pallet and chose blending options from the drop down menu>general blending was set to 97>Advanced blending was set to 78 and the final result was the second photo.

I captured a larger image with a screen capture software so it is a little off but I wanted you to see clearly and going though PS would have made it to large. So don't give up on those dark images and use your SS to stop the action.