In a previous post I mentioned that my strobes failed on a dive on September 23rd. When I got to my target depth of 45 feet to look at the remains of an underwater landslide I found two angel sharks. These have all but disappeared due to over fishing and these are the first I have seen in at least 15 years. Pssst.....guess what? MY Flipping (please substitute the word "flipping" for the appropriate adjective that begins with an F and ends in a K and has UC in between and ING on the end) strobes wouldn't fire. So I shot the angel sharks with available light. Here is one of the images:
My question is: Is this salvageable? And if so, how? What are the steps to get this into usable condition and get rid of the cyan cast of available light? I have downloaded some historical cyan cast posts on this forum but it wasn't really helpful for this kind of image. Obviously I'd like the angel shark to pop out as much as possible and have the image as a whole not look like it is total available light and cyan in nature. So for a learning experience we might be able to refer to for future education, what specific Photo Shop steps would you use to fix this image? Feel free to hijack it, tweak and then repost.
Thanks for the assistance.
Joe
That's a tough one, with the subject having a consistancy so similar to it's surroundings, I could not get it to look like much. I usually try auto colour first to see if I can get anything close to decent before spending too much time working with layers etc.
is it in RAW? did you try the WB adjustments? i think that could hep quite a bit
Hello,
Agreed, a tricky test for sure (and RAW could help a ton)...
Here are some *super* quick hacks to see if any of them are in the right direction. Let me know if these are anything like what you want or if you need something different. Does 1 of them stand out as something like what you want?
-- BTW I went back to glance at this post and I have to apologize for the nasty purple corner in the last rough draft hehe Really - we could do a ton better than that!
I get fairly similar results to jbonehoss with a couple of minute's work.
I've never seen one of those babies, so I'm not sure whether the colour's accurate or not. As mentioned above, the cyan cast is very strong, and the shark doesn't stand out much from it's surroundings, so it's hard to turn this into a fantastic shot, but it's salvageable
Thanks everyone. I did shoot it in raw and get the best result using flourescent believe it or not. I am going to play with it that way then use the channel mixer to see if I can get it close. Matt is very close as is Jbone. The difficulty is to distinguish the shark from the sand and I doubt that'll be easy since they are supposed to blend in with it.
Thanks again.
Joe
I did shoot it in raw and get the best result using flourescent believe it or not.
That would be expected, actually, since fluorescent light gives off a cool light (bluish). You should be able to get an even better result by selecting a manual white balance (or whatever it's called in your RAW converter), and picking a neutrally coloured element in the photo. A pale grain of sand should do nicely
Tried a crop
Here's my best attempt. I trashed the red channel and replaced it with the blue channel. Then I adjusted curves, hue&saturation, added contrast, and sharpened. Then I history brushed the water in the background.
You saw the famous toxis shark ?
Used William's version. Hard to bring it out more ...
Really - we could do a ton better than that!
