Never throw out your old pictures!

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wetman

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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:

shorseref.jpg


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:

shorseorig.jpg


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:

shorsefixed.jpg


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
 
Beautiful :) ...for tips on enhancing you might want to check out the boards at saltwaterfish.com . They're aquarium people rather than scuba people but they have a photo forum with a lot of folks who've spent a fair amount of effort capturing pics of the water world.
 
I agree - never throw anything out! And I go one step farther...never delete underwater unless it is
1) completely and totally out of focus AND you need the room on the card
or
2) tragically overexposed AND you need the room on the card!

Here's a link that might be what you are looking for
 
alcina,
That link is to the underwater.atn file that has been around for some time. It was discussed here many months ago. David Kusner is the originator of the process. He is known as "mandrake" on DigitalDiver.net.
I referred to it as the "mandrake process" and posted his process on my PT-010 site some time back.
I noticed on that Adobe Photo Exchange link that James Connel gave credit to "mandrake".
 
Yup, you're always learning....thanks for the reminder
 
justleesa:
Yup, you're always learning....thanks for the reminder

Ya, it was that mandrake process that triggered this whole thing.

Also though, those couple of new photoshop features i mentioned are truly excellent for some other hard to fix type shots. The Shadows/Highlights feature is just incredible to help pull out detail in the dark zones (say for example enhancing the inside of a cave if you're taking a picture looking out where the brighter portion has caused the dark portion to be underexposed). That has helped a ton of shots for me. Also, the match colors feature is just excellent as well if you need a kickstart on a picture that you dont know where to go with. For example, i had a picture of a hand holding a crab. The hand was washed out in blue and i had tried several things with it but couldnt get a good skin color out of it. So, i actually matched that color to an above land shot that i had zoomed in to the skin on. Turned out great.

Oh, and the removing of floaties is trivial with the polaroid dust and scratch removal tool. Its just excellent at locating dark or light colored specs and getting rid of them. The water up here never looked so clear :)

steve
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/

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