New to underwater photography, I have PS Elements

[J Kennedy]

I have a Kodak DX6490 and an Ikelite case. I have taken a lot of pictures and have recently begin manipulating them In PS Elements. If anyone has some quick tips on the functions to use I would be greatful. The pictures so far have been in springs and caverns. I do not have a strobe but have been using a 100k candle power dive light. I have been using the auto settings on the camera and playing with flash and no flash.

 

[Charlie99]

Figure out "layers". You won't be able to use but a small fraction of the power of PSE until you grasp the concept of layers.

The functions I use most often are
cropping tool
color cast correction
levels adjustment layer -- both individually adjusting endpoints of RGB independently, and also using the center slider to adjust color balance.
Auto levels and autocolor

Often I'll correct a photo a couple different ways and then blend them together using the opacity control on the various layers.

I highly recommend the series of books by Scott Kelby.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/03...002-2140195-2505630?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 is the one for PSE 4 . He has written other books with similar content for the other versions.
Although most of the book is about stuff like doing portrait touchup and digital restoration of old photos, and things like that, walking through the examples really helped me understand the functions available in PSE 3.

 

[J Kennedy]

Thanks for the advice. I ordered Master Guide for Underwater Digital Photography and
Digital Imaging for the Underwater Photographer which includes PSE. Hopefully these help. Your pictures look great, do you use all manual settings?

 

[Charlie99]

Hopefully these help. Your pictures look great, do you use all manual settings?

Just a simple point and shoot Olympus Stylus. For me photography is mostly a memory aid to help with fish and critter ID. Unfortunately, it has a real wimpy flash and no manual color balance, so I need to use levels to get back anything close to true colors.

For good photos, do a search for posts by "Gilligan".

 

[tkring]

I also use an Olympus Stylus 400 along with PSE. I like it because it is VERY simple to use but they do require editing to get the colors back.

Charlie99 is correct about levels. Levels is really all I use to get true color back in my pictures. Here is a website that I use to learn other tricks of PSE: http://www.photoshopelementsuser.com/, Click on the "Learning Center" tab. It has a few freebies in it that may help expand your knowledge.

Also, take a look at this article: http://www.scubaboard.com/cms/article18.html

 

[J Kennedy]

The digital imaging book I mentioned above gives great examples on how to fix pictures with the editing software. If you want tips it has them from fixing underexposure to removing back scatter. It tells you where to go in PS and PSE but the tips can be used with any software you just have to find the functions. After I read the part about the levels I fired up my computer and played with all of the bad pictures and was amazed at what that one function was able to do.

 

[alcina]

Jim Church's Essential Guide to Composition should be on every uw photographer's bookshelf (or better yet in your camera kit!!) Although written predigital, virtually everything translates and this is one book that you will come back to over and over again. Your photos will improve and that means less time in post processing.

The books by Scott Kilby are excellent and must haves for those who use Adobe PS products - he's got big books and "Killer Tips"....