Severe Colour Cast in Scuba Diving photos

[pm3009]

Hi

I do a lot of Scuba diving, and the majority of photos turn out blue. I installed Adobe's "Underwater" Action into PSE2, and it does a GREAT job
on most of the photos (like the attached fish photos - I'm very happy with how they turned out)...but on some, like the attached shark photos, it looks like it adds too much red, causing the water to look purple-ish. I think the photo of the shark that is edited with the underwater action is far better than the original....but what is the easiest way to make the water look more blue than purple, and still keeping the shark the way it came out after the edit with the underwater action?

Thanks for any tips you can give me!!
Pam

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Pam, don't have access to the filter you used, so did it manually, doing the following.

Dup the background.

Adjust levels on individual channels. Just move black and white markers to ends of respective histograms.

Red is totally black, as you'd expect in an underwater shot, so replaced it with green channel. To do this, copy green channel to a new alpha, darken it using levels, then select all, edit/copy, open red channel, edit/paste.

Sounds a bit involved, but once you've done it once, it only takes a couple of minutes.

Finally, fine tune by opening levels adj layer and adjusting middle sliders on R, G, and B channels to get desired result.

Hope this helps.

[deadants]

I was doing the levels on the seperate channels then fooling with the image/adjustments/variations. But Gary's method is more elegant and less prone to error.

[Stroker]

Variation that someone once referred to as 'Interactive Channel Mixer'. Wish I could remember whom I heard this from.

Start a new Layer Set.
Cut and Paste G and B into the Set.
Right-click Set > Layer Set Properties.
Turn off G and B channels.

You can now mix G and B into R in any manner that you want.
Blending modes, Opacity, and any adjustment layers that strike yer fancy.
Why, you can even lower the Opacity of the Set itself.

Takes practice and some fiddling, but it's a fairly solid technique with tweaks galore.

edit:
After a little peakage, maybe just turn of B and leave R and G turned on.
Don't forget that you can also turn on/off RGB for layers in the set.
Maybe do the set for RG, but have certain layers in the set to just R.

[Jaime]

Originally Posted by pm3009

I think the photo of the shark that is edited with the underwater action is far better than the original....but what is the easiest way to make the water look more blue than purple, and still keeping the shark the way it came out after the edit with the underwater action?

Hi Pam,
I think the easy way to correct color of the water from purple to blue is by creating a new Hue/Saturation layer and edit the hue (and optional the saturation) of the blues to your taste. In this case, I set hue to -17 with these results.

[pjanak]

The red channel in the shark photo is basically non existant. So to get rid of the blue cast I thought about copying the green channel to the red channel and I tried adjust the red channels Levels. But the copied image is far to similar to the other channels. So the only way this novice can see to correct this image is to have a steady hand and draw a lasso around the sharks and start from there

Pete

[imrtun]

Per Channel Levels.
Played around with the eyedropper tool in HSL on the blue and cyan levels.
Some reason it added a green 2 thing, it confused me but it looks good, prolly can't reproduce that though, i should pay more attention to myself.

[Icarus3000]

Gary, I wanted to thank you so much for your tip on erasing the red channel and copying the green. I used a few additional layers, but that was the key to fixing up this photo.

You should make a "Underwater Photography" tutorial!

Anything else you can recommend on this one?

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Icarus,

Glad I could help a little.

Not too good with tutorials, don't have the patience, and usually can't find the words to describe what I did in a way that makes it unambiguous and clear.

Love your latest picture. Have had a bit of a play with it, but not sure if it improves things or not.

Anyway, what I did was make a Shadow Mask, by pressing and holding down Ctrl+Alt+Shift+~ (sometimes the shift isn't needed, depends on how you have PS set up), then Select/Inverse.

I copied and pasted this to a new layer, then applied levels to it. Finally adjusted Opacity of layer to abou 70%.

The idea was to lift the shadow detail of the rocks and the girls hair, and whilst it worked reasonably well for the rocks, it didn't do much for the girls hair.