Tips for getting some of the blue out? (digital, Picasa)

[rottielover]

Hi all,

On my trip to Maui I took my Sealife 2 mega pixal cam down with me. When I used the external strobe on my first couple of dives, it worked great, nice color's etc.

On our scooter dive, I didn't want the added bulk of the strobe, so I took the strobe off and used just the camera in the housing, and of course all my pictures are BLUE!

I'm trying to figure out the best way to try and remove some of the blue in the photo, while bringing the other color's (yellow's pinks) out more. I'm using Google's Picasa software, and so far I've done a fair ammount of playing with it, but I still can't seem to get it right.

I know that Kodak has a service for film camera's called "Sea Processing", does anyone know if they do Digitals? Does anyone have any tips for getting some of the blue out with Picasa or another software?

Thanks

 

[alcina]

Great to hear you had a good time in Maui and got some pictures you are happy with!

There are two things here:
#1 - there may be no other colours in the photos to recover; software doesn't magically put missing colours/bits into your photos (you CAN do this with a lot of effort sometimes, but that's beyond the scope of this question) it merely enhances what is hiding!
#2 - recovering as much as possible. The more you work with your software the easier this becomes and the better you get at it. I don't do much of this as I haven't learned enough yet!

I've never used Picasa and I am a neophyte in PhotoShop, but if you post a couple of examples here I will try to help as much as I can and I am sure others will pitch in, too!

 

[rottielover]

Well I'm afraid reducing these to the 200k limit is going to really wash them out badly, but I'll do my best to export them in a workable format...

 

[rottielover]

In the above photo, you can tell that there are some yellow's, Red's, etc. but the blue is overpowering...

I've been trying to use the Tint functions to try and "bleed" out the blue, but to no avail...

 

[rottielover]

Here's a slightly fuzzy photo, but in it you can see the yellow scooter in the background and other colors....

 

[rottielover]

here is my attempt to clean up the first picture...

 

[verona]

I did this quickly in PS Elements. It is a good programme and not too expensive. Has a lot of functionality. Regarding blue, it is not always a bad thing - sometimes it can be quite effective. Here are a couple of my blue pics that I like.

 

[Mark Goodchild]

I've had a go with the blurry one but the results are not great.

I use Paint Shop Pro 8 to do this. This product is available cheaply and is pretty good. I have n't tried Elements but Photoshop also does a good job.

Try this link for some ideas of how to improve the shots.
http://www.zerovisibility.co.uk/Digital.htm

or this one for general photography tips
http://www.zerovisibility.co.uk/photography.htm

 

[rottielover]

I found out something pretty cool in Picasa, the effects of clicking on the various "automatic" fixes, are cumulative, rather than one time fixes. In other words you can click on "I'm feeling lucky", then "auto color", then "I'm feeling lucky" again and the effects from each are "added" each time you click the buttons. I've been able to clean up all my photo's this way, to the point that I'm now proud of some of most of them!

Here is a great example, in this photo, the before image was so blue that you could barely make out the turtle in the middle, and here are the results of me "playing" with the "autocorrect" buttons:

It's still not the best UW photo ever taken, far from it, but it looks a heck of a lot better now...

 

[justleesa]

Good to hear that you had a good time while you were here!

As alcina says, what isn't there you're not gonna find with a simple fix. With some time and effort you can save a picture and/or make something of it. Sometimes just turning it into a B&W will work wonders.

Here is your original photo and a version of my own.
Using Photoshop elements 3 (4 is now available) I adjust the levels with minimal results. I then went to use my trusty colorcast tool and got a coloring that seem pretty close to what it should look like. The tops of the corals are blown out and look all white with no texture. I used the clone tool to hide these areas. I also went in and "cleaned" the pennant fish and gave them some of their yellow back ( I see now that I gave it back in the wrong spot...SORRY!

). In using the color cast tool the blue in the background looked kinda dirty. I recolored the area with a lighter blue. In the end I sharpened up the picture a bit, but you can only sharpen so much before the picture turns bad.

Before:

After: