Redfilter in combination with 'daylight' setting ?

Hi, I am not new to UW video but new to this forum. For quite some time I have been making video’s underwater with my single chip Sony PC6 + Ikelight house with an external redfilter and the colors in the range of 20 – 120 feet are really nice. Unfortunately I am not able to control the MWB underwater so once I take the filter off in shallow water (tropical water by the way) it’s still to blueish and if I leave the filter in position it’s too reddish. I guess my question is; would it be an option to change the white balance in the camera to ‘daylight’ (before the dive) so that I benefit from less blue in the shallow water or... will that influence too much the colours on depth because of the combination 1) redfilter and 2) day light setting.

Anyone?

Hi, I am not new to UW video but new to this forum. For quite some time I have been making video’s underwater with my single chip Sony PC6 + Ikelight house with an external redfilter and the colors in the range of 20 – 120 feet are really nice. Unfortunately I am not able to control the MWB underwater so once I take the filter off in shallow water (tropical water by the way) it’s still to blueish and if I leave the filter in position it’s too reddish. I guess my question is; would it be an option to change the white balance in the camera to ‘daylight’ (before the dive) so that I benefit from less blue in the shallow water or... will that influence too much the colours on depth because of the combination 1) redfilter and 2) day light setting.

 

Anyone?

Welcome to wetpixel.

I would stick with the settings youare already using if it is giving you good colour in the usual diving range 20-120ft. When you get shallow, you could swap to a lighter filter, or just shoot it red and correct in your editing software. Red is easy to remove, difficult to add in.

Auto and daylight WB settings probably give very similar results underwater. Daylight might be preferable as auto can sometimes do some crazy things like wander between everything being green and purple (my TRV40).

Without a red filter or MWB ability footage becomes a totally washed out monochrome bluish green at a shallow depth, no matter what WB mode you are in. As Josh said I would leave the red filter on and correct on the computer.

When I was shooting dailies with a camera and housing that had an internal red filter that was screwed to the front of the camera, and no ability to do a MWB, I used to even shoot topside footage of divers exiting the water etc. with the camera still in the housing and even that much redness could be reasonably corrected on the computer with a colour balance adjustment.

Hi, I am not new to UW video but new to this forum. For quite some time I have been making video’s underwater with my single chip Sony PC6 + Ikelight house with an external redfilter and the colors in the range of 20 – 120 feet are really nice. Unfortunately I am not able to control the MWB underwater so once I take the filter off in shallow water (tropical water by the way) it’s still to blueish and if I leave the filter in position it’s too reddish. I guess my question is; would it be an option to change the white balance in the camera to ‘daylight’ (before the dive) so that I benefit from less blue in the shallow water or... will that influence too much the colours on depth because of the combination 1) redfilter and 2) day light setting.

 

Anyone?

To get good color, you'll need to be able to manually white balance your camera system. Does your camera allow this? If not then you're locked in to what you have.

You can usually color correct in post and that seems the best option with your system.

Frazier Nivens, Ocean Imaging

www.oceanimaging.com