19 replies to this topic

[Turbonium]

These pictures I took on my recent trip to the Similans with rental digicam. It was my first time, and the picture didn't come out too well. What can I do with Photoshop to enhance it? Feel free to play around and post your results.

[Turbonium]

I will post a few more here....

[Turbonium]

Another one

[Turbonium]

My favorite

[Turbonium]

This is a bettershot, colorwise, anything I can do here?

[bobjarman]

Third is the best of them, but its so far away its hard to tell what is going on. You need to work on getting closer to your subjects.

Work on curves, levels and contrast in the images if your have PS trubo.

Heres one wher I did some curve and contrast adjustments just as an example. I am sure others can do much better.

[bobjarman]

PS. the last two you posted are pretty good. I like the lion fish.

[Simon K.]

Here a quick touch up (2 Minutes). I is very difficult because of the small resolution and the strong compression. You will get much better results with the original (did you shoot raw?)

I did : Level Correction(don't remeberd the values) , +13 Contrast/+11 brightness, I used the Healing Brush to remove som distracting fishes, Unsharp Mask 50% 5,0 Pixels

Simon

[Simon K.]

Hi Bob,

yours is better then mine..... grmph.... ;-)

Simon

[Turbonium]

I dont know why, but everytime I do the touch up, it never come out as nice as the Auto feature in PS...

[bobjarman]

Try this:

Its a pretty good basics to curves tutorial:

http://www.gurusnetw...op/curves1.html


or this

http://www.outbackph...roombasics.html

or finally, this:

http://www.russellbrown.com/body.html

Those whould keep you busy for awile!


Ps: I am nopt sure yours wasnt better simon, they look awfully close.

[craig]

Here's another try on the same image that uses something other than levels and curves...



My goal was to make the fish bodies a combination of neutral tones and yellows rather than different shades of green. I reduced the overall level of green in the image and mixed green into red to create a greater contrast on the fish bodies while making the fins a truer yellow. After that I applied level adjustments, increased saturation, and some gamma correction. It's a delicate balance when doing this to get the yellows the way you want without turning the water purple. Masking helps but I avoided that here.

[bobjarman]

Craig wins!

[Simon K.]

I just don't get good results with the channel mixer. Any good tutorials out there?

[craig]

I don't know of any. I learned to use it from doing video where it's a godsend. I view it as a close personal friend.

The first thing I do after my RAW conversion is look at the overall color of the image, particularly in the dark areas. Since underwater photos frequently have blacks that are tinted green, I load the channel mixer first, select the green channel and adjust the "constant" field. In PS, that's the one at the bottom, not the second one! With video tools, you frequently get to sample a dark pixel and adjust its value numerically. I've developed a feel since I do it so often, but only small adjustments are called for in this control. (In PS, 0-10% to the left)

The next thing I do is decide whether the image has adequate red detail. If it does not, I choose the red channel and add some green to the red (that's the second slider). This is a rough adjustment that you fine-tune later using levels/curves. What this does is convert cyan to white and green to yellow. Converting green to yellow is almost always a good thing. The cyans are good when they are on the subject, but cyans in the water will wash out the characteristic blue. Careful setting of the black point improves this but it's a balancing act. Sliding the green control to the right makes it look like someone turned on a big, huge light.

These are the two things I've do to this image that make it different than others. Everything else is level/saturation/sharpening.

Interestingly, video pros (on the projection end, not the content end) drive home the need to set both black point and white point and it's something I do religiously. On the content side, setting black point is relatively unknown, but you can't properly set white point until the black point is correct. Above water, this is a non-issue since blacks are basically always right, but underwater there is a diffuse green "glow" caused by ambient light. This glow, or flare, causes black objects to appear increasingly green as you get further from them, virtually guaranteeing that black point will be wrong. This reduces contrast, reduces the SNR of the red and blue channels, and confuses the auto white balance and exposure functions in the camera. It's the reason the channel mixer trick is so consistently effective and is also the reason I prefer using a filter underwater. Filters function to correct this before the light enters the lens, so the degradation inside the camera is undone.

[markswr]

I've had a go with the 5th image which I thought could be simpley improved with some cropping. also did a bit of levels and sharpening.

mark

[Reefkeep]

Bob, great links thanks it helped me a lot.

[Ben]

Another try on the emperor...

[Ben]

And the shark...

[Ben]

...