Editing your underwater photos
What I often hear when people show me their (completely blue) shots after a dive is: "I will fix it with Photoshop".
Yeah, right...
Actually what they are telling me without realizing themselves is that they are magicians and that they are capable to make a full color photo out of a black-and-white photo, which we all know is impossible. When there are no colors in a photo it is not possible to get them in, at least not in a way that the photo shows exactly what you saw underwater.
Sure, you can add some red color to the photo with Photoshop but that means the red color appear as a red cast over the whole photo and not just at the places you need red.
This means your photos should have the colors as you saw them underwater. To accomplish that you need some basic knowledge of Digital Underwater Photography. When you already have this knowledge you can just read the rest of this page, otherwise it would be a good idea to start with the Digital Underwater Photography Course.
Editing and Retouching your underwater photos must not necessarily be very difficult. Basic knowledge of a photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp (free software with great online tutorials) is already enough to get good results.
I prefer the word "retouch" instead of "edit" because it says precisely what we will do with our photos. We will enhance a good photo to make it brilliant instead of manipulating a bad photo to make it look "acceptable". I hope you feel the difference about these two words.
Let me show you an example... This next photo is "off camera" and not changed.
In the next photo you can see the result after retouching. As you see the colors of the photo are still the same but brighter. I took the white cast away by changing the contrast. What you will also notice is that the "backscatter" (the white floating particles) are gone, I cleaned the photo.
That's it, that's all there is to it... You don't need to be a Photoshop Crack to "create" good underwater photos, you first need to learn taking good photos underwater and after that just retouch your best photos a bit.
Not yet convinced? Let me show you how most of the underwater photos come off the camera:
After working and sweating for half an hour in Photoshop this is the maximum what can be made of it. Now choose which of the four photos you like most...
When you want to learn more about Adobe Photoshop there are some great Photoshop tutorials available. At PhotoshopTutorials.ws, you will find in-depth Adobe Photoshop tutorials, Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorials and Photography tutorials. The new tutorials are created using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and CS4 but most can be followed using older versions such as Photoshop CS.
