This has been annoying me for the best part of a decade so now im revisiting just thought id ask. Going back to basics after doing very limited UW photo for a few years and awaiting new housing.

How are people getting nice blue water column shots?

For reference im using Canon (RAW) and DS161 strobes (4800K colour temperature) and processing in Lightroom Classic.

Whatever default picture profile i use produces different blues but none "nice" They all tend towards green or on darker/bluer ones the saturation looks hugely excessive and the whole image has a cartoony look (im not adding any extra).

Typically shooting 1/160 to 1/250 and ISO 400 ish (any lower i cant seem to get enough strobe output. On 400 theyre 1 stop off full without diffuser. ish. subject dependent)..

Well aware of shutter speed controlling the background water brightness but this is specifically the hue and saturation i can never get correct.

WB is auto or daylight (but RAW so doesn't matter - i adjust after the event). I can get the foreground colours correct but not the ugly background.

A few examples. These are raws just spat out as jpgs with no editing hence messy look, deliberately to show what i mean.

First example the odd, saturated, fake look of the water behind. This in about 10m in indonesia. f/8 , 1/160th, iso400. Picture style "Adobe Colour"

Here the light/green hue and so on. f/8, 1/160th, iso400 @ 10mm. Nusa Penida...So its blue in reality.

Background just looks odd. Again saturation. f/8, 1/200th, iso400. Nusa Penida in about 15m

Similans somewhere.

Greeny, light blue. Not pleasing. 1/100th, f8 ISO200. Gili Air, Indonesia in 6m

Plenty of other examples. Shots deliberately not edited to show the default issues.

What are peoples workflows for a starting point "nice" blue? Ive tried standard, faithful, landscape (helps foreground, oversaturates background) with ideally Canon? What can i do to get the images less cartoony? Reduce foreground light too? "Camera Landscape" shifts towards blue but seems to over saturate at the same time.

FWIW the new "adaptive profile" run gets the water to a nice blue on most of them but its a black box. I have no idea what or how its doing it so dont like it instinctively.

Added bonus tips, less "vivid" or cartoony looking images. Which maybe lighting related.

Edited yesterday at 02:39 PM1 day by Rich W

8 hours ago, Rich W said:

This has been annoying me for the best part of a decade so now im revisiting just thought id ask. Going back to basics after doing very limited UW photo for a few years and awaiting new housing.

How are people getting nice blue water column shots?

For reference im using Canon (RAW) and DS161 strobes (4800K colour temperature) and processing in Lightroom Classic.

Whatever default picture profile i use produces different blues but none "nice" They all tend towards green or on darker/bluer ones the saturation looks hugely excessive and the whole image has a cartoony look (im not adding any extra).

Typically shooting 1/160 to 1/250 and ISO 400 ish (any lower i cant seem to get enough strobe output. On 400 theyre 1 stop off full without diffuser. ish. subject dependent)..

Well aware of shutter speed controlling the background water brightness but this is specifically the hue and saturation i can never get correct.

WB is auto or daylight (but RAW so doesn't matter - i adjust after the event). I can get the foreground colours correct but not the ugly background.

A few examples. These are raws just spat out as jpgs with no editing hence messy look, deliberately to show what i mean.

First example the odd, saturated, fake look of the water behind. This in about 10m in indonesia. f/8 , 1/160th, iso400. Picture style "Adobe Colour"

Here the light/green hue and so on. f/8, 1/160th, iso400 @ 10mm. Nusa Penida...So its blue in reality.

Background just looks odd. Again saturation. f/8, 1/200th, iso400. Nusa Penida in about 15m

Similans somewhere.

Greeny, light blue. Not pleasing. 1/100th, f8 ISO200. Gili Air, Indonesia in 6m

Plenty of other examples. Shots deliberately not edited to show the default issues.

What are peoples workflows for a starting point "nice" blue? Ive tried standard, faithful, landscape (helps foreground, oversaturates background) with ideally Canon? What can i do to get the images less cartoony? Reduce foreground light too? "Camera Landscape" shifts towards blue but seems to over saturate at the same time.

FWIW the new "adaptive profile" run gets the water to a nice blue on most of them but its a black box. I have no idea what or how its doing it so dont like it instinctively.

Added bonus tips, less "vivid" or cartoony looking images. Which maybe lighting related.

You should have a good starting point with 4800K strobes. The idea behind warm strobe light is that to colour balance you shift to cooler colour temperatures. which gives you a deeper blue. I don't use Lightroom so can't offer anything specific there, though I would think any sort of profile designed for land use might be problematic in water. I'm not sure what the adaptive profile does, but I expect if the initial results are good it shouldn't matter - all the profile is doing is providing a starting point. I would suggest a number of things:

• Work in Adobe RGB, the blues are more extensive there, if publishing to web ensure a colour profile is included so it display properly. Don't convert to sRGB as it will crunch the blues

• Work in 16 bit colour - it gives you more latitude to work with, you can change to 8 bit when you save if you want to reduce storage space

• Have you tried camera matching options - it sets the image to what you set in camera.

• You could also try Neutral as the starting point for your own preset?

• What sort of display do you have? if it is limited to sRGB, it just can't display the deeper richer blues.

I'd also ask what settings you are using in camera any settings are typically recorded and as I understand things applied to your image as a starting point.

I'd also mention that ISO400 f8 and half power sounds like you should try to get closer, the Ikelite is quite a powerful strobe and people shoot at f11-13 regularly with similar or less powerful strobes. If you are not close enough the flash on the subject is diluted more with ambient light and the whole image needs to shift warm to get the colours you want on the foreground, but this warms up the blues.

4 hours ago, Chris Ross said:

You should have a good starting point with 4800K strobes. The idea behind warm strobe light is that to colour balance you shift to cooler colour temperatures. which gives you a deeper blue. I don't use Lightroom so can't offer anything specific there, though I would think any sort of profile designed for land use might be problematic in water. I'm not sure what the adaptive profile does, but I expect if the initial results are good it shouldn't matter - all the profile is doing is providing a starting point. I would suggest a number of things:

• Work in Adobe RGB, the blues are more extensive there, if publishing to web ensure a colour profile is included so it display properly. Don't convert to sRGB as it will crunch the blues

• Work in 16 bit colour - it gives you more latitude to work with, you can change to 8 bit when you save if you want to reduce storage space

• Have you tried camera matching options - it sets the image to what you set in camera.

• You could also try Neutral as the starting point for your own preset?

• What sort of display do you have? if it is limited to sRGB, it just can't display the deeper richer blues.

I should have included that really.

My display is a correctly calibrated DCI-P3 (95%) on both laptop and when home, the external screen.

Output is going to always be sRGB as output is for screen use and rarely if ever printing. Its LR/PS so is using higher than 8 bit colour. I dont see banding or things falling apart, its the default "look" causing me issues.

Viewing software is ICC aware as well.

Camera matching.... Historically ive never found any of those actually come close to matching the camera (either in camera or applying the same in Canon DPP). Camera landscape comes closest to making the water blue but at the expense of messing up saturation on this or other colours.

Ive tried with my own preset but no amount of fiddling with calibration or the HSL gets something really useful, certain now an import preset "starting point" level.

4 hours ago, Chris Ross said:

I'd also mention that ISO400 f8 and half power sounds like you should try to get closer, the Ikelite is quite a powerful strobe and people shoot at f11-13 regularly with similar or less powerful strobes. If you are not close enough the flash on the subject is diluted more with ambient light and the whole image needs to shift warm to get the colours you want on the foreground, but this warms up the blues.

The DS161s are basically half stops from max down to i think -6 stop adjustments. Generally if i have diffusers on then anything less than -0.5 stop (ie one click down) is too little. Without diffusers i can get to maybe -1.5, Shooting at 10mm (APS-C Tokina fisheye) and subject distance is typically closer than forearm length ish for turtle/reef shots.

In the above examples max distance is about 1m. most are 20-30cms.

Macro i can go down to -3 or -5 but for wide angle i just cant throw enough light onto them to get loser than iso400/f8 most of the time. Might be positioning related, no idea. I dont think tubes lose output with age that much (they're about 15 years old).

Ive never been able to get satisfying water colour starting point from any of the 4 (i think) Canon DSLRs ive used underwater over the year and not found a useful picture profile (or preset) yet as a starting point. For obvious reasons i dont like/want the one click "adaptive colour" to do "things" on every image as a starting point.

I wonder if setting white balance in camera to 4800k would make any difference? On the HF1 with diffusers I see it is recommended to set the same colour temp in camera as the diffuser used. The HF1 is a much warmer strobe at 6500k and personally I found the 4500k diffuser with WB set at the same temp also produced blues that did not look real (well to my taste ayway)! Best of luck John

3 hours ago, johnvila said:

I wonder if setting white balance in camera to 4800k would make any difference? On the HF1 with diffusers I see it is recommended to set the same colour temp in camera as the diffuser used. The HF1 is a much warmer strobe at 6500k and personally I found the 4500k diffuser with WB set at the same temp also produced blues that did not look real (well to my taste ayway)! Best of luck John

Not sure that will matter as i can just set that after the event in LR as its Raw anyway.

These days the need to use sRGB is less than it used to be,browsers these days have colour management by default and the blues are so much nicer in Adobe RGB. I think you should at least try it out.

I work a different workflow to many by Raw processing in Capture one and then finishing in Photoshop and I do it specifically because I can access levels as I find that the very simplest to way to colour balance a photo. Unfortunately Lightroom doesn't give you levels, you can do something similar with the tone curve though.

You don't really go into what processing steps you take - with the wrong steps it's easy to get messed up and become totally lost, You mention Calibration and HSL, I only use these sorts of tools very sparingly.

In Raw processing typically you have ability to adjust the colour temperature and Tint. Temperature is blue- yellow balance and tint is green magenta balance. It helps to have a good understanding of colour. basics are adding red reduces Cyan, adding magenta reduces green and adding blue reduces yellow. You should be able to get the balance close there. Typically I find adding some magenta to the image darkens the blues and makes them richer.

If you wanted I could try processing one of your raw files assuming of course my copy of Capture one will open it.

In many cases, the color of water in a photograph depends on the actual water. Transparency, impurities, and depth all determine the color. It can certainly be dramatically corrected in Photoshop. This applies only if the original color channels contain enough information (16-bit can sometimes help).
In one of the photos in the original post (3th), you can see how the blue color takes on a purple tint near the edge.

If you examine this photo layer by layer, you'll see how the black in the red layer transitions into a bright spot. This is a problem with insufficient natural light and dynamic range (especially with older cameras). You can artificially correct the color using data from other channels.