wetman
Contributor
So, the one thing i've learned in all this stuff is that you can always go back and fix up pictures you might not have been able to at the time.
I took a ton of shots in cuba a couple years ago. First time with the camera basically, hadnt learned much about flash and white balance etc. The vast majority of the pics were washed in blues or cyans and as you know, that varied in intensity with depth etc. Well, after playing around more with photoshop etc over the years, and moving from 7 to CS, you can really appreciate what you can do to some old shots that you had long ago abandoned as write-offs. So, never discard the old stuff that you think you screwed up at the time. You may learn your way around those flawed shots and tools like photoshop may come out with new features that really benefit the specific flaws in your shots.
The following pics lose a lot in the shrinking, but i think they will give a decent example anyways. As an example, one of the pics i took two years ago was a side on shot of a seahorse:
I really liked that shot because of the deep colors in the seahorse and the purples of the background etc. A slight tweaking and some removal of the water floaties and it works quite well.
However, that was the only shot in a series of about 6 that i took that had the flash on. I didnt notice that til later, but the other six looked terrible. Very cyan, yellow in the seahorse was washed out and just generally not all that interesting to look at:
So, with photoshop, you can do a few thing to enhance that a bit to actually make the pic come out to something a bit more enjoyable to see.
With about 1 minutes worth of tweaking you can turn it into something like this:
Some of the steps involed were enhancing the red chanel using a technique i found here in a white balance thread. Shadow/Highlight adjusting (new in photoshop cs), matching colors to the reference photo i had (1st photo above and also new in photoshop cs) as well as some quicky hue adjustments.
While none of the shots are perfect, I do think the modified picture certainly is much nicer to look at than the washed one. So now its just a case of going through some of the shots i took way back when to see what can be rescued from the lot of them.
Does anyone know of any links specifically for photoshop and underwater enhancing? Clearly some of the issues we have to deal with are pretty unique to the environment we take pictures in.
steve
I took a ton of shots in cuba a couple years ago. First time with the camera basically, hadnt learned much about flash and white balance etc. The vast majority of the pics were washed in blues or cyans and as you know, that varied in intensity with depth etc. Well, after playing around more with photoshop etc over the years, and moving from 7 to CS, you can really appreciate what you can do to some old shots that you had long ago abandoned as write-offs. So, never discard the old stuff that you think you screwed up at the time. You may learn your way around those flawed shots and tools like photoshop may come out with new features that really benefit the specific flaws in your shots.
The following pics lose a lot in the shrinking, but i think they will give a decent example anyways. As an example, one of the pics i took two years ago was a side on shot of a seahorse:
I really liked that shot because of the deep colors in the seahorse and the purples of the background etc. A slight tweaking and some removal of the water floaties and it works quite well.
However, that was the only shot in a series of about 6 that i took that had the flash on. I didnt notice that til later, but the other six looked terrible. Very cyan, yellow in the seahorse was washed out and just generally not all that interesting to look at:
So, with photoshop, you can do a few thing to enhance that a bit to actually make the pic come out to something a bit more enjoyable to see.
With about 1 minutes worth of tweaking you can turn it into something like this:
Some of the steps involed were enhancing the red chanel using a technique i found here in a white balance thread. Shadow/Highlight adjusting (new in photoshop cs), matching colors to the reference photo i had (1st photo above and also new in photoshop cs) as well as some quicky hue adjustments.
While none of the shots are perfect, I do think the modified picture certainly is much nicer to look at than the washed one. So now its just a case of going through some of the shots i took way back when to see what can be rescued from the lot of them.
Does anyone know of any links specifically for photoshop and underwater enhancing? Clearly some of the issues we have to deal with are pretty unique to the environment we take pictures in.
steve