pp help - adding a ball in soccer shot

so i took some soccer photos of my youth pastors son in the summer and am now editing them. i have not had photoshop until recently when i acquired cs1. yes i know its cs1 but its a heck of a lot better than not having any pp software. also im not a really advanced user (i have just started layering) so the only thing that i am disappointed in is the lack of a good conversion to b/w- cs1 only has a desaturation option...

any-who: so this shot, i was using my dad's old nikon 70-300mm with my d40: thus no AF, which is why its not particularly sharp but i missed getting the ball in the shot. so i took the ball from a different shot and 'added' it. im not particularly good at this so i was hoping to ask if it looks okay and hopefully someone could teach me how to make it look natural... thanks!!

here are the shots:

the original (without the ball):


here is my first edit: (basically just dropped the ball, should have smoothed the edges but i didnt...)


here is my second edit: (smoothed edges and stuff and tried to make it look natural)

 

Make it a bit darker, it stands out too much.

 

okay, thanks

is this better? i lowered levels, highlights a bit and brightness a bit..

 

Checkout the "Image/Adjustment/Channel Mixer..." dialog. Its a rather good B&W conversion method.

 

Maybe try just spot-burning the ball itself?

 

remember how i said i do not know a whole lot about pp, well im not really sure what that means =) lol.. but i found it and applied it (wow ps is insane! and i feel like i only know about 2% of it) .

i have the exposure of it set at 78% and on the midtones. i hope those settings are right.. i did it and it looked kinda simliar to my last edit. i think the problem is that some of the ball is overexposed

 

shoot dude, here it is burned and i even tried using the clone to get rid of the white spot and fill in some lines...

im not sure if its any better.. i just can figure out what the ball should look like in this shot.. im hoping some ps geniuses can take a look and figure it out
thanks for your help!1

 

At a glance, I'd probably buy it if I didn't know it wasn't merged.

 

My difficulty with it is that the rest of the image seems to have relatively flat lighting, and then the soccerball is quite bright in the middle and then dark around the edges.

I wonder if decreasing the contrast etc on the ball would be helpful.

 

nice. and i did auto-color in ps and it seemed to help some too (got rid of red tint)

i know its hard to tell if it fits when we know its merged.. i need to get some opinions of people who havent seen it..

 

okay, thanks for the advice. i lowered the contrast down about 16% and i think it did help. thanks!

i dont know though it just seems fake to me, but thats probably b/c i know it is

 

agreed. look at where the light is, on the other side of the kids. you can see this clearly when you look at the person with the blond hair over to the right where just a bit of that person's right side is lit. the key to making this look real is noticing that. if the ball were actually where you have placed it, what you would be seeing is the un-lit side of the ball (so if you could suspend reality and walk around to the other side of the ball [the side you cannot see in the picture] you would see light falling on it). i'm going to guess (from memory because as i write this i can't go back to the pic) this is around 2-3 oclock. so best advice is make the light somewhat uniform on the parts of the ball you can see (you would not have a bright spot in the ball [chances are the ball you have placed in the pice was shot going the other way no?]). i hope this makes sense.

as far as photoshop goes, what you have done is an overall darkening. what you want to do is darken only the light areas first so they relate to the edges. then you can play around with how dark things need to be.

eta: just looked at the shot again. it was the blonde kid who is mostly hidden in the back who i was refering to. also, you might get away with the ball having a bit of light in upper left. you'll just have to try it out.