Lizardfish Chewing Gum

This is a shot from this morning. Yet ANOTHER lizardfish getting some action. Alas poor toby, I knew him well! Cropped and auto-levelled. I would LOVE some advice for touching up UW images with Adobe Photoshop(have CS) other than using auto-levels. Auto-levels is good sometimes, but often darkens a bit more than I like. I am a touch-up novice, so would appreciate any advice.

This shot was done using Oly 5050 with internal flash in about 15' of water. Perfect conditions here in Hawaii today.

--John

Why is everyone seeing lizardfish action except for me?

For a quick fix to auto-levels darkening too much, hit CTRL-SHIFT-F (or the equivalent Mac shortcut, whatever that may be) to Fade Auto-Levels. (The Fade command is also up in the Edit menu somewhere).

You can choose a % to fade what you have just done. Works for just about every Photoshop action you do, unless you are in 16-bit mode.

Or don't rely on auto-levels and get more into it using "levels" ctrl + l or "curves" ctrl + m (or mac equivs).

I would also advise to not use Auto-Levels but Levels.

I find the results of auto-level for UW Shots always suboptimal.

I would also not do the level correction in Levels for all colors at once but for each color channel (Red, Green, Blue)

You'll get much better results and it works pretty fast when you get a little experience.

For most pictures I need less than 30 seconds for level correction.

Simon

Hi!

You'll find a good article about levels at www.dive.snoack.de. She describes in detail what happens when you modify channels one by one.

I do (WA ambient light shots, at most) the blue channel first, then green and finally red to see what's left for a natural looking image. Sometimes back to blue/green at this point.

If you use layers you may compare different versions and select the best fit afterwards if it's a difficult one.

Helge ;-)=)

I prefer manual leveling over auto-leveling, but for my quick web postings, I almost always do the following:

1) Auto Contrast

2) Fade

3) Auto Level

4) Fade (or, undo, since it usually does way too much)

5) Sharpen and resize (action, with keyboard shortcut)

Takes about 10 seconds.

That's about it. It's only the web, after all. Most images look good.