A quickie post, really. I took lots of photographs while scuba diving at Sipadan last year. A selection of the nicest ones are in my flickr stream. But when I originally uploaded them, I hadn’t modified them at all. Mostly because I’d had to trawl through 1600+ honeymoon photos and it was rather late in the day.
But today I thought I’d spend 5 minutes seeing if they could be improved — as it was a cheapy point & click camera hired from the dive company, and all the pictures were really flat and horrible. I am amazed how much better they are after a few minutes clicking about in picasa. Here’s a before & after:
Before
After
Click through for bigger versions.
I made some progress just using the I’m Feeling Lucky button, but what really made them come alive was the Tint effect: using a white tint and dragging the bar almost all the way to the top really made everything pop out nicely.
If you have any similar tips, I’d love to hear them…
This post is tagged diving, fish, picasa, processing, scuba, sipadan
Blogged: Always post-process your underwater photographs… http://harrymetcalfe.com/2011/02/always-… (includes purty fishes)
Harry, I know quite a bit about this! Ideally you either (i) shoot in RAW and/or (ii) manual white balance at the time and/or use eg a “Magic Filter” (go Google…). But even with pics like yours where you haven’t, you’ve a number of options.
Picasa and “I’m feeling lucky” is actually my fave tool of all for UW pics for a quick “polish” and a good idea for what else you may be able to do. A manual “levels” correction in Photoshop – all three RGB channels separately – is the next thing to try (actually came out fairly similar to your second result, above). Finally there’s a preset “Action” for Photoshop which does some complex layering and colouring stuff and can eg restore red colours where there’s very little there. I tried quickly and that gave the best results on this pic…
Feel free to contact me for more thoughts… Have precedents I can show you too…
Useful! I did try using custom white balance — not sure if it was for this pic or not — but my buddy got annoyed with me faffing with the camera
I’d *love* to be able to take my 5D next time, but the housings are so expensive that I doubt it’ll ever be practical. I’d love to see the Photoshop version – is that an action specifically made to correct colours in underwater shots?
Love what you’ve done, and demonstrated, here. Good work. I wouldn’t mind being pointed towards any good Photoshop Actions too…
Me too! I am planning to make the switch, but Adobe’s stuff is frightfully unreasonably expensive.