Yow!
Moved my photoshop diver blog to a new URL; catalinaunderwaterphoto.com. Successfully! Welcome!
Okay, I had the best info flat out from this source. Word Press Hacks is a great source. The other sources had my eyes tearing up as I read the instructions. This method went flawlessly. Had a lot to do with the plug-in recommended in the above article. Sweet.
This was a great day in August and the conditions were unbelievable. No wind, no current, warm water, hot sun. We dove spots we usually don’t get to, like this cool wall that is exposed and usually has way too much wind and current to dive. We dove the invertebrate reserve and I got some nice photos of lobster.
The kelp beds were sweet. The visibility was so good, honestly at times it seemed 100′ or better.
Another great dive day. The sun was out and the visibility was all time great. I got some great photos of Bat Rays, one of my favorite subjects. I also got some great movies which I will post soon.
No strobes on these shots. I could have pushed photoshop harder but I went for the more natural look. These were easy and took one levels adjustment and one contrast curve only.
These photos are from the back side of Catalina. I took the shots after the Farnsworth dive. The backside spots were very cool, that’s the only time I’d been there. We were mostly in deep spots, and I think I was too narked from the previous dives to get many photos, the ones not posted were blurry and generally f’d-up.
Okay this was such a great day and I love how these photos turned out. We had bright sun and great vis. No strobe on this session, I’d been using it for a while now and always wound up liking my results better after some simple photoshop work and no flash. So I decided to give it a try again.
I took a lot of movies in this this session and filled the camera card. These clips made up my “Rookery Revisited” movie. The cool thing with movies is doing the same types of levels adjustment as you would in photoshop, only in AfterEffects instead.
Okay, let’s get these photo galleries up to date! I’m determined to get these old photos posted.
This batch marks my return to strobeless shooting. And right away, over 20 usable photos instead of 8, with some help from Photoshop of course. Check ‘em out.
Okay, I am so behind in updating my photo galleries. I still have about 10 more to bring myself up to date. I think I will just make my posts as brief as possible for now to get these photos posted.
Again, these were taken with my non-ttl strobe. I continued to use the strobe for more sessions but eventually stopped using it. Main reason is that I could get more usable shots when not using a strobe. Sounds strange, but it’s true. Before using the strobe and after giving it up, I would get 20 or more usable photos per session, as opposed to 6 or 10 usable photos when using it. When I get a good photo with the strobe there is usually very little work to with Photoshop. But if the photo was not quite exposed right there is not much I can do to salvage it because it’s either hopelessly underexposed or hopelessly blown-out from the flash. Compared to if I’d not used the flash, then a much larger majority of photos are salvageable.
A true TTL strobe would probably solve this. My current rig won’t handle that, but if the prices come down for a housing for my digital SLR, or I strike it rich, my now non-ttl strobe would work with that camera as a true TTL. That would be fun to try.
These photos are from a 3 day live aboard dive trip to Cortes Banks on the Peace. On the way home we stopped at Santa Barbara Island for some shallow lobster hunting. These Panoramas are from that stop. I took no dive photos on this trip and brought my camera without it’s housing. I think that was probably a mistake. Rats.
Anyway, I love to monkey with Photoshop’s photo merge. These panoramas made from photos taken from the boat posed a problem for photoshop. The results frequently didn’t marry up perfectly, the way they can when the photos are taken more carefully. I also was not able to use the auto, or perspective settings because of the strange perspective results and the interactive setting would just quit with no results. I could only use the “flat” setting, and then at least one photo or more photos from the batch would be omitted from the merge, and I’d have to add it manually. Then they all need touching up on the auto masks. Merging into the batch a photo composed mainly of empty water was a particular problem, as was the fact that boat moved up and down.
But I am more than pleased with the first and last panorama. Those I think turned out great and would look very nice printed large format after some more careful cleanup work.
Yipes, I have not updated this site in a few weeks! And I still have 10 more galleries to bring me up to date with my latest dive trip.
So lets take a look at my photos from my dive trip to Catalina on 9-14-03. Well, first off, I fired off about 30 shots but only came up with about 4 usable photos. I was shooting only macro with my manual strobe loaded with my super-diffuser cap. The vis was terrible for this dive trip. We started west of Parson’s Landing then moved east to Parson’s itself and then on to two more dives at Emerald Bay. The vis got worse as we moved east, until the last dive I could barely see my hand at arms length away from my face. Getting only four good photos out of 30 was not a great session. I’ve had better.
As far as the photoshopping, shooting macro with a strobe, if properly exposed, doesn’t require much. And I was getting a nice ocean color background instead of the “Moonscape Black” backgrounds I see on most underwater macro shots. Yeesh I hate that, you wouldn’t take a photo of friend on a sunny day and induce a black background and call it a good photo would you? Why do people find that acceptable in underwater photos? IMHO, an underwater background should never be black unless the photo was taken at night. Okay, rant over.
Anyway, I did my first move, the first move all underwater photographers should make, Levels, and that pretty much took care of everything. Except for the photo of the fish. I added a selective color adjustment layer to knock down some of the outrageously strong reds produced my the strobe firing on the purple and red algae on the rocks. The lobster photo could use the same treatment, but there were areas in the photo that needed to be masked out to have this work, as some areas in this particular photo did not need the selective color treatment. I let the photo stand as it is, but if I were to make a print I would go the extra mile and do a little masking and add a selective color adjustment.
Most photographers don’t understand selective color, and that is okay, because it really is not a “photography” color correction tool, it is actually a “scanning” color correction tool. Many photographers that are interested and/or curious about photoshop don’t realize that the program was not initially developed as a tool to process photography, but as a tool to scan photography and process scanned photography. Only after the advent of widespread digital photography and quality digital cameras, did photoshop begin adding more purely photography based tools to what was originally a drum scanning and color correction program.
More manual strobe (non-TTL) shots. And some seriously murky water. This day did have nice weather, it was August and the sun was out and the weather was warm. But the water was very murky as you can see in the shots. Although some of the photos look kind of surreal.
But I was really getting the hang of this manual strobe. This is using the diffuser cap I stuffed with extra layers of frosted mylar to give extra diffusing power. I like the way the light was just falling off the subject and allowing lots of blue and green to show in the background. I also got a few shots of an Abalone I fed kelp to. Only one shot of three had a decent exposure and it was questionable, but I posted it. It was so cool because I broke off a small piece of kelp and laid it in front of him, and he lifted his shell and snatched it up. In the photo I posted you can see a second piece of kelp I tried to offer, but he wasn’t interested.
As far as photoshop on these photos, the way I light these shots still leaves plenty of room for my usual levels and curves adjustment layers. The strobe lights the foreground and adds to reds, but where it drops off the color situation is the same as without a strobe. In many of these I could subtract a little red along with subtracting plenty of blue and green, and get some nice results, rather than mostly adding a little red as when using no strobe at all.
to the home of my underwater scuba photo galleries. Check out my photos and movies and see how and why I use software like Photoshop, Final Cut and Aftereffects to color correct my images and video clips.
