Many divers don’t have the luxury of using underwater strobes to provide effective directional lighting for their underwater photography.\u00a0 With a basic point-and-shoot underwater camera, the resulting pictures are often washed-out and contain too little red light.\u00a0 When the in-built flash on a compact camera is used, it has a very limited range (1-4ft) and the light will be reflected from any particles suspended in the water (called ‘backscatter’).\u00a0 This will result in distracting white spots all over the photo. [no_toc]<\/p>\n
I utilise Photoshop CS5 to remedy these problems, using a simple 5 minute edit to color correct the photos, providing a more natural lighting, and to remove the backscatter.\u00a0\u00a0 This edit often makes a drastic improvement to the quality of the photo.<\/p>\n
It’s important to ensure that your original photo is properly white balanced at the time of taking the photo.\u00a0 This gives you more to work with at the time of editing.\u00a0 Likewise, if your camera takes RAW photos, then use that format for your editing, as it gives your photo editing software far more information to work with.<\/p>\n