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Scuba Forum / UK Scuba / June 2007Colour Adjustment of photos
Help!!!! I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes great underwater photos but cannot be fitted with a red filter to give true colours. So the option is to adjust the images after saving the picture using Serif Photo Plus. Now the question ..... What do I adjust - Hue, Colour, etc and do I bring up red or take down blue or something else. I could spend a long time experimenting but I am sure there is some wizard out their in virtual underwater world who can point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance Andy R. > Help!!!! > I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes > great underwater photos but cannot be fitted with a red filter to give > true colours. Don't be so quick to dismiss your housing as being unsuitable for filters. UR-PRO may have the market pretty stitched up but there is an alternative, and it will work with housings that do not have a filter thread. Point your browser at http://www.magic-filters.com and you will find one that is suitable for your camera, I would suggest the AutoMagic as the F30 does not have manual white-balance. > So the option is to adjust the images after saving the > picture using Serif Photo Plus. [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > Thanks in advance > Andy R. There are several techniques that you can use to bring back the colour in your photos in post processing. If you do a search on the "Mandrake technique" you might turn up something useful. There are also some good tutorials at http://www.digitaldiver.net, although it is primarily a forum so join up to that and you can tap the wealth of knowledge that is the DDN userbase. jon ~~~ > > Help!!!! > > I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > find one that is suitable for your camera, I would suggest the AutoMagic > as the F30 does not have manual white-balance. Err, I think it does have manual white balance. It's under the white balance menu. You point the camera at a white object, and press the shutter. When the display says 'Set' you're done. Remember to reset as you change depth. The F30 also has an underwater mode, which I am led to believe, adjust the white balance automatically at whichever depth you are at. I know this 'cos I just bought one, with the waterproof case. Going to Greece on Sat where I plan to take lots of u/w pics. White balance is only really any good down to about 10m. Below that you'll need an external light source... >>> Help!!!! >>> I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > White balance is only really any good down to about 10m. Below that > you'll need an external light source... Sorry, my bad. I was just going on what Fuji had on their site under the camera specs. They make no mention of custom white balance, only the preset modes and auto. I had to download the manual to find anything about CWB. I would still recomend getting the filter as it does make a real difference and is still cheaper than any form of strobe. I would say that 10m is a little lean, more like 15m, but it depends on conditions. Another tip is to set the exposure compensation to -1.0eV as the metering in digital cameras tends to overexpose when subjected to underwater light conditions. Your photos will look less washed out and it is also easier to recover a photo that is slightly under than over. Enjoy your trip. > I would still recomend getting the filter as it does make a real > difference and is still cheaper than any form of strobe. I would say > that 10m is a little lean, more like 15m, but it depends on conditions. I am planning to pop into the Cameras Underwater shop on Embankment on Friday, so I'll look out for filters. > Another tip is to set the exposure compensation to -1.0eV as the > metering in digital cameras tends to overexpose when subjected to > underwater light conditions. Your photos will look less washed out and > it is also easier to recover a photo that is slightly under than over. THanks for the tip, I'll give it a go. Hoping to have the chance to take loads of pics and do some experimentation, to it'll be interesting to see how it works out. >> > Help!!!! >> > I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] >> find one that is suitable for your camera, I would suggest the AutoMagic >> as the F30 does not have manual white-balance. F30 does have manual white balance - but you can't use it in conjunction with Underwater mode. Advice is to forget UW mode ... and use the WB. Initially I was using the back of my hand, but at depth it changes colour ... so now use a dive slate to balance off. > Help!!!! > I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes great [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > direction. > Thanks in advance While filters can be placed in front of your lens (if your housing is not threaded it can still be done, albeit more expensively) the effect has its limitations. In order to restore the balance, the filter has to permit more red through than greens and blues. The problem is, you don't need to go very deep at all before there are no reds AT ALL and no amount of filtering will permit the non-existant red to be expressed in your pictures. The long and short of it is, that unless you are happy to have all your pics come out greeny-blue (more green in the Atlantic and Med, more blue inthe tropics) OR decide in favour of B&W (don't dismiss it outright - it can be absolutely fabulous) you'll most likely end up with a flashgun, and unless you want most of your pics to look like you were in a snowstorm, your flash will need to be external to your camera housing. Commercial solutions are available and they work, but at a price. For the sake of a bit of shopping around you can make your own external flash using readily-available bits and pieces, all you have to do is buy them and put them together having decided what power flash you're going for. Have a look at http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/homebrewflash to see how I made mine for around £50 - 70. It's on its way to its third trip (or is it fourth?) to the Red Sea in three weeks' time. All the pics on the site can be enlarged for better appreciation. Ken > Have a look athttp://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/homebrewflashto see how > I made mine for around ?50 - 70. It's on its way to its third trip (or is it > fourth?) to the Red Sea in three weeks' time. All the pics on the site can > be enlarged for better appreciation. Very impressive! I've been thinking about external light sources, but put off a bit by the price. As I read through it I was thinking, why didnt' he put the two pashes in separate boxes, and then you mentioned it at the end. Impressed by your battery pack idea too - would never have occurred to me to do something like that. There's not time before I go on holiday on Sat, but I'm going away again in Sept. Perhaps I'll give this a try in time for then. >Have a look at http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/homebrewflash to see how >I made mine for around £50 - 70. It's on its way to its third trip (or is it >fourth?) to the Red Sea in three weeks' time. I made one and it worked well until I flooded it so I am on the lookout for another vivitar flash but they're quite rare now. however, occasionally ebay has one.  SignatureIan >>Have a look at http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/homebrewflash to see >>how [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > lookout for another vivitar flash but they're quite rare now. however, > occasionally ebay has one. AFAIK the Vivitar flash was discontinued JUST AS Fuji brought out its own unit which apart from being black, was identical to the Vivitar offering. This was on sale for £150, being a single flash head. This too seems to have disappeared from shops. Of course the principal remains unaltered, and any suitably small flashgun can be pressed into such service. I now use a better flash bracket than is covered in my webpage. The plastic flashbar is still used to mount the camera case on, but a flexible arm is used, available from Cromwells http://www.cromwell.co.uk/IND4477230K?popup=yes for a far more flexible (pardon the pun). more robust and not as Heath-Robinson looking an affair. Ken > Help!!!! > I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > wizard out their in virtual underwater world who can point me in the > right direction. I don't know Serif Photo Plus, but I have Photoshop Elements. In there, it's simplay a case of Auto Colour Correct. Amazing!! Have a look at these cuttlefish pics to see the difference. Think the depth was around 7m Before: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/306572073/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/306572069/ After: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122485/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122483/ >> Help!!!! >> I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122485/ > http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122483/ Many of the better photoediting progs have similar functions, PaintShopPro has a "One Step Photo Fix" which works apparent miracles. BUT the limitation is that if you take a pic below a certain depth where there is no red, none can be recorded and none can be enhanced. What tends to happen then is that the program - which of course has no idea what it is you've taken a pic of or what it should look like - merely tries to average out your pic and adds red wher it sees absence of any colour - making your blacks red instead. How deep you have to go before this happens depends on several factors, like water clarity and angle of incidence of sunlight on the water surface. Hence you can get away with no flash at greater depths in the Red Sea than you can in the North Sea. But even in the tropics there are limits, and they occur well within recreational scuba depths. Ken > Many of the better photoediting progs have similar functions, PaintShopPro > has a "One Step Photo Fix" which works apparent miracles. Not for me. I have PSP XI and have tried this on several pictures. None of them came even close to a hand-tweaked result. > BUT the limitation > is that if you take a pic below a certain depth where there is no red, none > can be recorded and none can be enhanced. Yep. Got plenty of those. > What tends to happen then is that > the program - which of course has no idea what it is you've taken a pic of > or what it should look like - merely tries to average out your pic and adds > red wher it sees absence of any colour - making your blacks red instead. I'll take your word for that. > How deep you have to go before this happens depends on several factors, like > water clarity and angle of incidence of sunlight on the water surface. Hence > you can get away with no flash at greater depths in the Red Sea than you can > in the North Sea. But even in the tropics there are limits, and they occur > well within recreational scuba depths. I have pictures taken in the Red Sea showing noticable discolouration at just 2 or 3 metres. I'll try and get some examples on my web site soon. In the mean time, I've put up just the one example of how I colour-correct my pictures, at http://joe.hotchkiss.com/photos/fixes/photofix.html I haven't found any definitions of what the 'Mandrake Technique' is, so this may well be the same thing or something similar. I wouldn't know. Basically, I stretch the histogram of the red, green, and blue components separately. That's about it. Follow the link for an example of how well it works and judge for yourself. (There's not much else on the web site for now. The previous incarnation of the site got removed and I haven't replaced it yet. I want to put new content in rather than just putting the old stuff back.) SignatureJoe http://joe.hotchkiss.com http://harrowsubaqua.org.uk > I haven't found any definitions of what the 'Mandrake Technique' is, so > this may well be the same thing or something similar. I wouldn't know. Here are some links to colour correction techniques http://www.scubaboard.com/cms/article18-doc5.html Mandrake is described there but a clearer description is on this page http://kayakdiver.com/divephotos/adjustments.htm And if you have photoshop there are some actions here, the underwater.atn one is a version of Mandrake with autolevels and flattening in one. http://www.justinunderwater.com/photoshopactions.htm jon ~~~ A big thank you to all who replied to my query. Especially the people who sent me "before" and "after" photos. Regards Andy R. "Alastair" <AlastairScarlett@gmail.com> wrote in message > I don't know Serif Photo Plus, but I have Photoshop Elements. In > there, it's simplay a case of Auto Colour Correct. Amazing!! [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122485/ > http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122483/ I have Photoshop CS3 ... (only just got it) ... what steps did you use in Photshop Elements to carry out the fix, I'd like to see if same steps are in Photoshop >> Help!!!! >> I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 19 lines] > http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122485/ > http://www.flickr.com/photos/50329493@N00/471122483/ The problem is the auto-corrected photos no longer have any underwater appearance, they now look artificial. Perhaps a half-way correction would be better. Adam >>> Help!!!! >>> I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 23 lines] > appearance, they now look artificial. Perhaps a half-way correction would > be better. Diver not in contact with the bottom, bubbles, fish in mid-air, coral foramtions? :)) Ken >>>> Help!!!! >>>> I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 28 lines] > > Ken It all leads to a bizarre looking scene, with the colors of a desert land scene but with underwater objects. I had the same problem when I had my printer driver to correct the colors--the end result looked artificial. Adam >>>>> Help!!!! >>>>> I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes [quoted text clipped - 34 lines] > scene but with underwater objects. I had the same problem when I had my > printer driver to correct the colors--the end result looked artificial. In many regards, the best (from an artistic viewpoint perhaps?) is to use B&W. In doing so, you completely bypass the issue of colour. You can capture many nuances of shade and lighting which are not apparent with the distraction of colour. What, after all, is the real colour? Is it the colour we perceive when we look with our own eyes, accepting there is an "auto white balance" in our heads? Of course this is NOT an infallible device, and we perceive more reds than are there but of course we cannot register ANY red if there is NONE there. Should we then record the scene as it is, with ambient light only and then not apply any correction? Should we introduce artificial light, so that scenes appear AS IF they had been illuminted by the full spectrum of sunlight on a cloudless day? Should we not crop our pics, or de-speckle them? Whatever we do is artificial. We often assume our pics taken on land show true colour, but look up some photographs and compare the colours shown next to the actual clothes worn - and you see that the reproduction is NOT perfect. Ultimately, what I'm after (can't speak for anyone else) is a pic that I like. Sometimes I like an unaltered pic, greeny-blue though it may be. Sometimes I prefer it to look as if it WAS taken outdoors ona sunny day. I have for example a (to me) very pleasant pic of soft corals which seem to have been painted by someone on LSD. If I did NOT colour correct, how could I illustrate the riot of colour we sometimes see (or at least think we see) down there? Ken Andy ... here is a post I made on the Cymru Divers forum ... works for me: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cymru_divers/message/195 As some of you know, I like taking pictures while diving - I'm not particularly good at it - but I enjoy doing so. One of the annoying factors is when you see something great UW, then you look at the picture later .. it has a serious blue cast, and detail, contrast & colour seem to be missing - nothing like you remember it. ( Blue Peter bit - The blue cast is caused by the water removing the red colour with increasing depth ) You can fix this by turning the water at depth into daylight . hence the divers with huge scaffolding affairs attaching multiple flash heads to increasingly larger UW housings. Or you can (within limits) use manual white balance, forcing the camera to do what your eyes & brain are doing automatically - correcting for colour, or alternatively add filters. Had a useful mail this morning from an expert in post-edit treatment of UW pictures - Saeed Rashid, he was the guy doing the `master classes' at LIDS. He has modified an Adobe Photoshop script, which by pressing a single mouse click . fixes the colour cast. Obviously the best time to get it right is at the time of taking, I'm sure though that for many you have lots of pictures with a Blue cast (or Cyan to be picky) .. This does provide superb results in seconds. I have take 2 pictures at random .. and applied only his `script' . I think the improvement is great, and saves hours of messing about with adjustment layers, channel mixers, etc. I have loaded the before & after shots to this website in the pictures section - I don't hold these up as expert pictures, just an example of what this script does. All I have done is run the script (takes seconds) and saved them at smaller file size to suit the web site limits. They could probably be further improved by sharpening, cropping etc. This script is free - and you can download it form his website - http://www.focusindepth.com/Focusindepth/focusindepth_home.html If you do go there take a look at the tutorials - especially the one on the turtle - he knows his stuff on Photoshop, and enjoys passing on his knowledge. > Help!!!! > I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes great [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > direction. > Thanks in advance After so much of what has been said, I've revisited Photoshop (which I hadn't used for a while) and used the underwater.atn facility that I had forgotten about. I pulled out some of my old pics, as taken BEFORE any processing was carried out. I then put these images through Photoshop, and saved them under a new name. I again went back to the original pic and used the "enhance photo - one stop photo fix" function in Paint Shop Pro. Overall, PS did a better job than PSP. HOWEVER, there were a FEW pics where the results from PSP were more leasing that the results obtained from PS. In many cases both progs performed vst improvements on the pics, in some cases it may be just a metter of tase whether you prefer the auto adjustments resulting from PSP or PS. However there were a few shots where the PS result was doubtlesly better than PSP's and vice versa. From now on - and as from the next trip in a fortnight's time, and more time consuming as it might be, every pic gets the double treatment - autoprocessing through PSP and PS. Oh that there a macro somewhere (is there perhaps and I don;t know about it?) where by a load of pics could be loaded into these programmes, and the auto functions set about their job, and then save the results? I could concentrate later on minor tweaking and cropping! Ken > From now on - and as from the next trip in a fortnight's time, and more time > consuming as it might be, every pic gets the double treatment - > autoprocessing through PSP and PS. Oh that there a macro somewhere (is there > perhaps and I don;t know about it?) where by a load of pics could be loaded > into these programmes, and the auto functions set about their job, and then > save the results? I could concentrate later on minor tweaking and cropping! Hi Ken. If you are using JPEG images, then there is some loss of quality each time you open and save the file. So opening and saving in PS, then PSP, then possible one or both again to do your manual tweaks will lose an awful lot of quality. Even "lossless" JPEG has some domain transformation errors in most implementations. It may not be visible to you, but you can never get that quality back once its gone. Of course if you're using TIFF then this applies less. The auto transformations in both PS and PSP are pretty blunt instruments too. If you want quick gratification then they're OK, but remember (again) that the changes they make are irreversible and most will lose information from the original image. You're far better manually applying the transformations that you need. One approach might be to keep original copies of all the images and to do you "quick pass" on copies to see what they will look like. Then you can go back and process the good images manually. The automated processes are NOT magic and the same results can be obtained with much finer control in a few minutes. Just a thought... Ian (Formerly camera and image processing software designer) >> From now on - and as from the next trip in a fortnight's time, and more >> time [quoted text clipped - 36 lines] > > (Formerly camera and image processing software designer) I have no doubt you are correct, especially given the footnote! However, I live for things other than my photographs too! I take on board your comment, but after coming back with (for example) 400 pics, were I to spend a few mins (5?) on EACH pic with EACH software package, that would come to around 60hrs solid work! OK, I will have alreeady discarded some pics while away - blurred, gross exposure errors, gross composition errors - and I accept that I could probably pick out a couple of dozen worthy of further treatment and not bother with most. But I found it absolutely amazing what some of the differences were. I don't have a readily posted-to website I could easily hang some of these pics on. Two pics of those I processed immediately spring to mind. One of a Napoleon Wrasse and another of a shoal of Barracuda, both taken without flash (not enough time to cycle!) within mins of each other as it happens at Shark-Yolanda June last year. Both were lacking in detail, mostly blue pics. PSP made a mess of each of them, I was able to do SOME resurrecting with manual controls to one, but culdn't do anything with the other - but PS transformed these almost miraculously with "underwater.atn". And this is part of the problem. In order to get the best out of the software I would need to spend some - a lot - of time learning all the subtleties and tweaks. No doubt others can do better manually than I can with the automations, no doubt I could do better too - after a load of practice. BUT I have other calls on my time, and the robotic actions do so very very well . . . . Ken > Help!!!! > I am a novice with digital photography. Have a Fuji F30 which takes great [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > Thanks in advance > Andy R. The Fuji F30 has an underwater mode which is supposed to correct some of the color problems. Adam |
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