Editing land vs. uw photos

fairybasslet · Oct 11, 2006

I can edit my topside photos so much more quickly than my underwater photos. I have less problems making decisions about how I want things to look and can generally do the post production in a couple of minutes. But for an uw photo, I agonize and agonize over what it should look like and wind up not getting anything done or hating what I did. Why is that?

letterboy · Oct 11, 2006

you are to picky

uttahere

CheddarChick · Oct 11, 2006

Don't feel bad I do the same thing. Sometimes I spend an hour on a photo and am just as happy with the auto fix end result as the one I torture my self with

Jamdiver · Oct 11, 2006

fairybasslet:
I can edit my topside photos so much more quickly than my underwater photos. I have less problems making decisions about how I want things to look and can generally do the post production in a couple of minutes. But for an uw photo, I agonize and agonize over what it should look like and wind up not getting anything done or hating what I did. Why is that?

Several factors play into this, first some background and then i'll tell you why I think that is.......

Lighting underwater is much more difficult IMO than on land due to the pecularities of the medium in which we dive in..

There is a disconnect rather large in some cases between what our eyes and brain 'see' and what the camera records....
Our eyes can compensate for the overall bluish colour cast underwater fairly well, but the camera can't without resorting to manual WB or the introduction of artificial light.

So what this means is that when it comes time to begin editing photos, we're always trying to get the photo to look like what we 'saw'....
And let's not get into the seemingly infinite variations/settings that we can use in Photoshop to work on the photo.

Generally I edit until the image looks or feels right to me, not very scientific, but it works for me

.

I think land is a lot easier because instinctually we know how things are supposed to look.......
Mountains, flowers, people et cetera

.

fairybasslet · Oct 11, 2006

CheddarChick:
Don't feel bad I do the same thing. Sometimes I spend an hour on a photo and am just as happy with the auto fix end result as the one I torture my self with

Well, I usually start off with autofix to see if I can save myself some torture, but it usually doesn't work.
Love your sig line by the way. Some dude from Toronto told me today that I didn't look old enough to have a 17 yo. What a line. :rofl3:

HowardE · Oct 11, 2006

Jamdiver:
I think land is a lot easier because instinctually we know how things are supposed to look.......
Mountains, flowers, people et cetera .

I don't know if it's instinct, but I agree... we've been living on land our whole life. It's easy to recall how a mountain should look, or the color or a flower. The color of a sponge, fish, reef, or other underwater thing, is more of a fleeting memory.

Even if you have 1000 dives, it's realistically only about a month's worth of actual time. (if you average an hour each dive)

HowardE · Oct 11, 2006

fairybasslet:
Well, I usually start off with autofix to see if I can save myself some torture, but it usually doesn't work.
Love your sig line by the way. Some dude from Toronto told me today that I didn't look old enough to have a 17 yo. What a line.

Auto-fix shouldn't work... Auto-fix is OK for topside photos, but underwater photos are different.

What program are you using to adjust your photos?

BurBunny · Oct 12, 2006

For me it's because I care more about the u/w shots...

But it is also the lighting issue, color, etc. Cameras were designed to take good topside pics. Their algorhytms (sp?) are designed for topside colors and lighting conditions. Even cameras with an underwater mode are just putting something on top of the basic chip design. Then add in often an artificial light source. I find I spend more time on a topside flash pic than a natural light... so, too, does strobe bring in other considerations underwater.

Don't fight it. Everything about diving is time and $$$ consuming. But we do it because we love it!

fairybasslet · Oct 12, 2006

howarde:
What program are you using to adjust your photos?

I use PS Elements.

HowardE · Oct 12, 2006

fairybasslet:
I use PS Elements.

I don't know much about elements. Does it have levels? I would manually adjust the color levels under "Levels" to start.

I know there's a couple of tutorials out there. Maybe title a thread called, "help with PS elements" ??

Editing land vs. uw photos

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fairybasslet

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