I shoot my granddaughter's dance recitals. Probably similar conditions to what you describe. Due to budget considerations I don't have a variety of fast quality lenses to choose from. I shoot in TV mode with speed set to 125 and ISO 400. I use high speed continuous burst mode and take 3 to 4 shots at a time hand held with no flash. Since by definition dance means motion shooting this way I usually get several good shots per dance routine where the action is frozen and no motion blur. At F/4 and 400 ISO the resulting photos are underexposed but I correct that in post processing and I have minimal noise to deal with. The camera white balance is set for Tungsten but most shots require some color correction because of the various different colored lights shining on the dancers.

There are ways to shoot these types of scenes without going out and purchasing a $2000 fast lens. A guy in my photography club shoots Open Mike nights. He has a camera similar to yours and his fastest lens is F/4. He generally gets really nice results because through trial and error he has learned how to shoot in that environment with the equipment he has and then enhance the resulting photos in post processing.

My camera is a Canon 5D3 with 24-105 F/4 L IS lens. I have faster lenses but they are fixed and don't give me the flexibility to zoom in on my granddaughter and zoom out to get group shots although I'm considering trying my 100mm F/2.8 L next time for at least one routine and see if it improves the resulting photos.

Perhaps I'm just dense but On1 does not make it clear if this is a new product that will exist along side their other products or is it the next upgrade from Photo 10. Anyone know?

I like Topaz Impression.

While not an answer to you question you might want to try the Photoshop plugin Lumenzia. It's a powerful yet relatively simple to use tool for creating luminosity masks. At $40 a relative bargain. https://gregbenzphotography.com/lumenzia/

He also has some free actions for creating luminosity mask (not using Lumenzia) that might help you.

I've been away from UH for awhile and coming late to this party. Apparently you have posted other training videos which were well received. Where do I find them and where can the new ones on Elements be found?

Definitely HiRez. But as has been pointed out a good superzoom point and shoot would probably serve him better.

I've been using PPS for a few years and upgraded to version 9 when it came out late last year. Much to my disappointment it will not run on my HP laptop which ran version 8.5 just fine and runs the latest versions of Photoshop CC , Lightroom, Photomatix HDR Pro, Topaz, NIK, and some other photo editing tools. I contacted OnOne and here is their response.

"Thank you for using onOne Software! We apologize for the frustration, but our software is not compatible with the Intel HD graphics cards. The Intel cards simply do not meet the dedicated video memory requirement needed to run our software. We require a video card from AMD or NVIDIA with Open GL 2.0 or higher with a minimum of 256 Mb of dedicated video memory. We apologize for this inconvenience, if you do not have a compatible machine to run the software please respond to this email with your order number and we will fully refund your purchase for you right away.


Technical Support - onOne Software"

This applies to desktop computers as well so if you are interested in PPS9 don't buy it outright even if you are running an earlier version of PPS. First try the trial version to make sure it will run on your machine.

Look it up on Adobe's website or simply download the trial versions and see if they run.

Keep in mind that there may be features in CC that you like which are not available in CS6. IMHO if you don't want to subscribe and get Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 plus some other perks then stay away from Adobe.

I haven't used Paintshop but I hear it's pretty good. Personally I like OnOne's Perfect Photo Suite 9. They keep improving it, it has a very good equivalent to Content Aware Fill, supports layers, and has good masking tools among other features.

Photoshop Elements also just keeps getting more powerful for editing photos as does Lightroom but Lightroom doesn't support layers.

I have a 7D and IMHO it does not do well in low light no flash situations. I would suggest you go to the shelter ASAP and take a series of test shots at various ISO settings and then run them through some PP software. This will help you determine what the best ISO setting is that doesn't get to much noise in the image. In my experience what initially looks like an underexposed photo can be turned into a nice photo with some PP. This allows you to use a lower ISO setting which means less noise and still get good results.

Also consider converting to black and white. This type of setting usually lends itself well to B&W images.

As for which lens to use it will depend upon the location. I would use the 70-300 if possible. You will be shooting candids and this allows you to get far away from your subjects. However the confines of the building may not allow you to use that long a lens.

I like RAW Therapee for handling RAW images and performing basic but powerful adjustments. But it depends upon what you want to do. Anything beyond basic adjustments requires support for layers. Paint.net and GIMP handle layers. Others may as well.

Thanks. I use to build my own PCs back in the day when you could save substantial money. Since then I just buy them and haven't kept up much with changing technology and never did pay a lot of attention to graphics cards.

I bought a IPS monitor and plan to set up a two monitor system with another non-IPS monitor. I'm looking for a graphics card that won't break the bank but has the horsepower to easily handle both monitors. The IPS monitor is a NEC PA271W. My current graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 with 2GBs of memory. It is dual monitor capable but is a lower end graphics card. I'm not a pro and will be doing editing using Photoshop CC and other photo editing software.

Do I even need a better graphics card?
If so which one? How much onboard memory?
Any other suggestions?

Get a vest. Fisherman's vests work great for photographers. Lots of pockets for extra cards, batteries, filters, you name it.

Windows 8 sucks. Under the hood it's an improvement over previous operating systems but it really sucks as a user interface. I suppose if you take the time to learn it you can do most things but they did take away a couple of right click menu items in Windows Explorer that I use pretty much every time I use my PC. Plus it is not as mouse friendly since it was developed for a touch screen. I can run my mouse all over the right and left side of the screen without getting the slide out charm bar to appear.

Windows 8 was developed for users who spend a lot of time on social media. At least that's how it appears to me. I don't. I do serious work on my PC and spend very little time socializing. Here and another Canon specific forum is 95% of my computer socializing so Windows 8 social media centric touch screen user interface doesn't work for me.
Fortunately I found Classic Shell and I don't need the charm bars. Plus Classic Shell boots right to the desktop where I do 99% of my work and has the right click menu items that I use all the time in Windows Explorer that Microsoft took out.

If I were to offer advice to someone just starting out in photography who didn't have a computer I would probably recommend a MAC even though I've never used one. That however does not mean I'll be switching.:-)