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I've been examining exif info on other photos that look good/bad to see what the photographer did right/wrong. Here's a set of photos that I think look horrible. Any insight why these look so grainy and underexposed? Just looking at the exif info I wouldn't think they'd look much better.

http://tinyurl.com/2kfn9c

My apologizes in advance if the photographer is on this board - I'm just trying to learn! ~(:

Thanks,
`S

One big thing is that the white balance is wrong, so everything looks jaundiced and bad. I will often go for a slightly yellow/orange tint for indoor shots to give that "low light" look, and underexpose slightly ditto. But for indoor sport... no.

I think boosting the exposure, applying noise reduction then if necessary reducing the final image size to restore a bit of sharpness would improve the shots.

With all due respect to Moz, the wb setting is probably correct for the conditions encountered. The setting was flouro, and from looking at these images, the photographer appears to have done a number of things right.

For instance, all of the images appear to share the following settings:

ISO 1600, 1/200, f/1.8, 85mm, wb flouro, on a D80.

This means that the photographer has taken the time to analyse the conditions under which he's going to be shooting, and has manually set his camera accordingly. That's a great start.

Sadly, flouro is difficult to shoot under, and generally turns out with a green cast, which is what we're seeing here. I'm guessing that he shot straight to jpg, which gives him few options to tweak the wb in his PP. With nowhere to take his wb in PP, he's left with ... a green cast.

Had he shot in raw, he could have tweaked the wb to come up with something that looks more natural, if not more pleasant.

1600 ISO ... on the D80, that's going to look grainy. He's wanted to freeze the action and used 1/200 to do it, and without knowledge of the conditions, ISO 1600 was the way to go.

Again, shooting onto JPG gives you few options for tweaking exposure in your PP.

And most of the images are crooked!

In CS3 you can elect to open you jpeg in the raw converter which allows to change the temperature of your shot, that's what I do . It may also be improved by using the "variation" option in the "image adjustment" column.
Cheers,
Gerard