Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Easily adjust underwater photos' color and clarity' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Easily adjust underwater photos' color and clarity
Authored by: billy.kessler on Nov 19, '06 09:08:44PM

There is an easy, non-tedious way to recover realistic colors from underwater photos in Photoshop. It's only a step or two harder than clicking "Auto-whatever", and the results are much better (and are controllable). The following are commands from Photoshop Elements 2.0:

Pull down Enhance => Adjust Brightness/Contrast => Levels
(Or get there directly with Command-L)
One after another, switch the Channel selector to Red, Green, Blue.

In each of these, you will find a histogram showing a narrow peak with zero values outside the peak (as opposed to the broad peak in a typical in-air photo). In each of RGB windows in turn, drag the endpoint sliders below the histogram to more closely enclose the peak. After having done all three, you will be amazed to see a photo that looks like it did when you were there, not the typical washed-out photo like robq's first example.

The reason this works is that water, and the stuff floating in it, dramatically reduces the dynamic range of a photo. That's why the histograms show only a narrow peak. By getting rid of the zero values in the histogram, you have in effect broadened the range, and the results are much more realistic than the often wierd effects you get by the canned Auto-x commands (in either iPhoto or Photoshop).



[ Reply to This | # ]