How to get the Blue out of those U/W Shots

[Daylon]

Actually - it's pretty simple, although it doesn't work 100% of the time. It works best if you have some *possibly* colorful stuff in the shot, but have a lot of water between you and your subject.

Here's what you do: (Using Adobe Photoshop CS2)

First sharpen using Unsharp mask (120%, .06, 0 threshold)

Take your image, create a duplicate layer (layer--> duplicate later)

Then select Filter--> blur ---> average

You should get basically a solid color square -

don't worry! You're doing okay so far.

Select Control + I to invert the color layer - now it should be red or pinkish.

Go to your layers window, select the "Overlay" instead of Normal and then move the slidey bar for opacity.

It's pretty simple, and in this case, I got some really nice results!

Try using the auto-balance feature afterwards and see if it helps at all.

Then you're done! Or you can go back and tweak individual colors in Lightroom like I did.

Before and after pics



Full size corrected picture -



Originally posted by Jeremy Payne of Wetpixel -
Wetpixel member Jeremy Payne posts a link to his technique for color correcting underwater images exposed with too little strobe light.
Here’s a method that can often return significant natural-looking color to your underwater images that have that blue/green cast. This technique works best with images without a lot of water column and lots of colorful stuff. I’m using Photoshop CS3 for this tutorial, but most of the effects are easy to replicate in other editors.