How to edit underwater photos?

I never see spoken here, but underwater photo editing is quite demanding and a challenge, since the photos don't always come out with that desired look! The blues are often faded and the colors of people, animals and corals are not always real, but greenish or whitish skin.

It would be interesting for the more experienced to share some of their tricks and Before/After samples.

I hope the post can be useful for newbies in UW editing like me!

Hi Stillviking,

It would be great if you could post pictures as examples.

Thanks

Post a Raw and I bet a bunch of people would contribute their edit with explanations. I know another photo website I visit has a regular editing competition (only bragging rights are on the line).

1 hour ago, stillviking said:

I never see spoken here, but underwater photo editing is quite demanding and a challenge, since the photos don't always come out with that desired look! The blues are often faded and the colors of people, animals and corals are not always real, but greenish or whitish skin.

It would be interesting for the more experienced to share some of their tricks and Before/After samples.

I hope the post can be useful for newbies in UW editing like me!

You might want to check out this website (if you are planning to use Lightroom):

https://www.goaskerin.com

I've taken a few of her classes and was attending the live events during the beginning of Covid. They are very well done.

- brett

I think it's almost a given that a lot of images don't come out quite how they are planned!

Whilst important to get as close as possible in-camera, with u/w images, a bit of home-tinkering is, I think, almost inevitable. The impact and degradation on image sharpness and saturation by seawater is significant.

I've been using LR since v1.0 (yeah, I'm that old) and it is hugely capable. Some of the later additions, especially Dehaze, Clarity and Vibrance can make a huge difference moving an image from a bit flat to delivering punch. The relatively new Mask control can also really help. And shoot RAW so that you can improve those blues and help skin tones.

Although I don't apply them to every image, tweaking those 3 settings are pretty much go-to for me. One setting I do use on almost all images (topside as well) is a -11 setting on Effects>Vignetting>Amount. I do find this draws the eye into the image. 

I think one thing to remember though is that images are subjective. What one viewer may like in terms of colour rendition, another may hate. 

2 hours ago, waterpixel said:

Hi Stillviking,

It would be great if you could post pictures as examples.

Thanks

 

Hello!

This suggestion give me a great ideia!

I uploaded a RAW file of a manta I did last dive and I love it, but colors aren't good. Now people can just do their magic (on Lightroom probably) and show their own edits!!

LINK: https://easyupload.io/8fu8je

Lets make it happen! 

Here's a 30 second job:

LR will let you make a Mask of the first manta and then you can do all sorts of things with that. You could then do the same with mantas 2 and 3 although probably less effectively. I then cropped it. 

Like Tim I have been using LR since it came out. It is good for doing all three phases of image editing: 1) culling and ranking, 2) metadata editing (keywords, titles, captions), and 3) image adjustments a.k.a. post-processing. For a large shoot such as last night when I shot >1100 pix I will use Photo Mechanic to do an initial cull. I deleted about 90% so a lot fewer to import into LR!!!

I dug up an example showing LR capabilities existing before last year - I have not used the new masking capabilities on this image. LR has a way of displaying before and after. I did a super-compressed jpg of the screen grab to make it fit Wetpixel's imitations. You can see some of the adjustments in the right panel. Note the water is stained. These are Chinook Salmon which are up to about 1 meter long (in this shot). They can get still larger but these are very rare.

I'll be happy to share some tips.   I've been doing underwater image post-processing DLSR images shot in RAW since 2016.   It's gotten much easier for me with practice so I tend to know what to do to start with and get results quickly.

First, some examples.   A few years ago I put together a quick web page to show my friends that nice underwater shots were not due to 'the camera', but instead were due to the post processing done later.  I did this by showing before (out of camera) and after (post-processed) images.   You can see them here:  https://www.cjcphoto.net/beforeafter/all.html

My workflow starts in-camera, setting base ISO if I am shooting with strobes for maximum dynamic range.   If shooting wide angle, I'm often shooting ambient, and there you have all sort of color correction issues.   You really do not want to shoot in JPG underwater unless you're also using a preset white balance for the depth.   If you mix ambient and strobe, it gets really tough due to mixed lighting - best advice I can give there is to turn your strobes down so as to not overwhelm the ambient so much, or better yet, gel the strobes to match the ambient at the particular depth.   Basically, for a beginner, try shooting in bright sunny weather, not too deep, in ambient.

Exposure - here I (shooting cameras like D810, D850 or Z9 with lots of dynamic range) mostly just glance at the histogram to make sure I'm in the ballpark and don't have overexposure (blinkies).   I adjust exposure in post all the time, often by a stop or more.   If at base ISO.   If shooting ambient at ISO 3600, I am much more careful on exposure as you do not have the latitude to shift the histogram around in post.

White Balance: The most critical thing you can fix, and it's usually not hard.  (Except with mixed strobe/ambient).   In your post-processing program (I use Lightroom), you need an eyedropper tool to sample a neutral point.   And neutral points are often quite easy to find underwater.   First tip here: Always pick the closest possible target to sample.   The more distance you have to the subject, the more it is *supposed* to look blueish.

Tip: Look for bits of broken or bleached coral.  This is very common and is usually white.

Tip:  Beware selecting dark-looking targets for neutral points, like the middle of a fish eye or a deep shadow in a reef.  There are often color casts there.   Best choice is the black you find on dive gear.

Tip:  Lots of neutral points on dive gear.  Aluminum tanks are decent if close to you.

Tip: (Probably Lightroom-specific) - at high ISO's and deeper water, you just don't have a lot of color to work with shooting ambient.  When there isn't red in the ambient to start with, you can't very well pull down all the other colors to match it.   You just get the best look you can.   Sometimes you end up with weird results and are not sure what to do with the temperature and tint sliders.  I've found that there is a pattern when the sliders are correctly set.  That is that the Tint slider is always about a certain distance to the right of the Temperature slider.  In Lightroom, the maximum Tint value you can set is +150.   When you get to that point, the Temperature still needs to be a bit too the left (if you start looking at your files you'll notice how much).  If you don't have enough color in the file, you're done.  You can't keep moving the Temperature up more, or it will just look bad.

Tip: Once you've sampled and set white balance, you can (and often should) still adjust the Temperature manually.  Adding a bit more Temp makes the shot more colorful, up to a point.  Then it becomes garish.   You can play with the Tint slider too, finding a happy balance between too much magenta and too much green.  You DO need a calibrated monitor...

Removing Underwater Haze:   Particularly when your subject is too far away, you often get a low contrast or flat-looking shot that just looks murky.   In Lightroom you can use the Black slider to pull the histogram toward the dark end of the range.  You must be very careful not to overdue it here, but often if you just about get the histogram to barely touch the left side, it will make the image look like it was shot in much cleaner water.  It will also darken your midrange too, so you may need to add a bit of exposure, then maybe pull the black point down a bit more, etc.

Here is one of the examples in the web page mentioned above. This was a squid that kept hanging around one spot, even though I circled him taking shots with a 16-30 lens in ambient lighting.   The main fixes were to crop and set white balance.  I used the white sand closest to the camera for an eyedropper sample in Lightroom to set the color.

And here is the result after setting the white balance, cropping and using a bit of contrast and saturation.

I took a shot at the raw Manta file in Lightroom.   Spent 3-5 minutes on it.

I cropped with the sun rays in mind, and the other mantas.  I don't know how to increase the visibility of sun rays or I would have done that here.

I used the eyedropper tool to white balance on the closest white portion of the manta's mandibles.   I didn't adjust color after that, except I did change to Camera Neutral profile because it gives me a bit flatter image to start with and usually ends up holding more detail in the shadows.  I ended up at Temp: 14,500 with Tint: +143.   Almost out of colors to balance.  (You hit +150 and you're pretty much done.)

I also pulled the White slider down a bit, with the goal to reduce the brightness of the manta.

I pulled the Black slider almost to 100% here, and I pulled the highlights down almost as far.  The fish on the manta were still too bright, so I ended up putting a radial mask around the bright parts of the manta and pulling the local exposure down there.

I added a touch of (1 point) of noise reduction, along with the default Lightroom sharpening.

I pulled the shadows way down too, trying to increase the contrast of the sun rays, but moving that slider all over didn't have much affect.

I like this look.  Wish the other mantas were more visible, but I don't think there is enough info there to bring them out and look decent.

Here's my edits, the process is fairly simple but you can't actually do it on Lightroom as you don't have a levels tool.  In PS you go through each channel and pull in the black and white points to just touch the edge of the histogram, the technique is described here:

https://digital-photography-school.com/using-levels-photoshop-image-correct-color-contrast/

sounds complicated but once you get it takes seconds to do it.  This will get you 99% of the way there, some images you might need to tweak a bit to get the blue where you want.  You don't have to mask it at all to correct colour- that is a last resort!

After that some curves adjustment to boost contrast a little.  I use luminosity masks to isolate adjustments to highlight/midtone shadows or you could just play with an S curve.  A little noise reduction on the water as it's quite noisy and using the same mask as that inverted to only sharpen the main manta

On 10/10/2022 at 8:42 AM, stillviking said:

I never see spoken here, but underwater photo editing is quite demanding and a challenge, since the photos don't always come out with that desired look! The blues are often faded and the colors of people, animals and corals are not always real, but greenish or whitish skin.

It would be interesting for the more experienced to share some of their tricks and Before/After samples.

I hope the post can be useful for newbies in UW editing like me!

How do you shoot and edit currently?  What software? 

After looking at Craig's edits I decided to give it another go to tone the bright spotlight on the manta, my approach was to develop the image in raw a second time with about 1 stop less exposure then comine that image with the standard version processed for the background with layer masks.  I have an old website saved that describes the steps I can't locate it online any more, but it's in the webarchive here:  http://web.archive.org/web/20051221042414/http://www.keiko-ni.com/keikosite/equiptech/digital/dynamicrange/dynamrng1.html

the site talks about using separate camera exposures but it also works well with the same image with different exposure from your raw converter.  The processing is the same as before after I have combined the images and I used luminosity masks from this site, the basic free version works fine:  https://goodlight.us/writing/luminositymasks/luminositymasks-1.html

Click on the image to view it against a dark background, it looks a bit dim against the white webpage.

6 hours ago, phxazcraig said:

How do you shoot and edit currently?  What software? 

Lightroom, I just do the basics and now using Texture/Clarity/Dehaze too.

Loving how the post is going, great contributions on the RAW manta shoot! Keep it going! 

Here's my version, and looking through this thread it just goes to show how personal PP is and there is no one singular way

First up in Lightroom, I made a few basic adjustments- white balance off the remoras, black and whits points and some dehaze 

After that I went into photoshop - maybe more in depth than the OP is currently doing, but this wold by my workflow. 

Starting from the bottom of the stack, layer 0 copy is just the shot run through Topaz Denoise. 

Next up is a curves layer where I added an 'S' curve to the whole shot to add a little more punch

Curves 2 is a luminosity mask to pull down the highlights on the remoras and part of the main Manta

Curves 3 is another S curve that was just used to target the sun rays to boost them a little bit

The Selective colour layer was set to 'neutral' and I boosted the blacks - just on the Remoras though

Last - not shown here - was a resize and some output sharpening on the main Manta

Final shot - 

Might sound a little complicated, but once you learn a few techniques its really not that difficult 

Mike

17 hours ago, stillviking said:

Lightroom, I just do the basics and now using Texture/Clarity/Dehaze too.

Loving how the post is going, great contributions on the RAW manta shoot! Keep it going! 

Beware using clarity.  I try not to go above 1.   Texture is OK - you can do a lot with it.   I don't use Dehaze so can't comment on it.

2 hours ago, phxazcraig said:

Beware using clarity.  I try not to go above 1.   Texture is OK - you can do a lot with it.   I don't use Dehaze so can't comment on it.

Isn’t clarity on a scale of -100 to +100, starting at a value of 0 and moving in integers? Never going above one you might as well say you don’t use clarity?

4 hours ago, phxazcraig said:

Beware using clarity.  I try not to go above 1.   Texture is OK - you can do a lot with it.   I don't use Dehaze so can't comment on it.

I'm trying clarity +18 not looking bad, why you say to avoid above +1?

21 hours ago, stillviking said:

I'm trying clarity +18 not looking bad, why you say to avoid above +1?

The more you look at it, the more it looks 'crunchy'.   Yes, if I use it at all, it's very minimal.  I did like it for a while, but I think it's like too much sharpening - you learn to see the effects, and then you start noticing them at more subtle levels.  

On 10/12/2022 at 11:42 PM, hyp said:

Isn’t clarity on a scale of -100 to +100, starting at a value of 0 and moving in integers? Never going above one you might as well say you don’t use clarity?

Correct, I barely use it.