Best U/W Settings for Olympus TG-4?

[Ayisha]

I'm about to leave on a Bahamas trip with my new TG-4 and am wondering which settings I should try. I've heard of benefits and drawbacks to each setting. Some people say that "U/W 1" and "U/W 2" turn out quite blue and mute colours. In my previous Olympus camera, I managed to get some colour without strobes by setting it to F2.8 and letting it choose the shutter speed for each pic. I have the Olympus PT-056 housing, but don't have strobes at this time. I have it set to jpeg and RAW as I've seen suggested, although I have never worked with RAW, but will try.

Any suggestions on which setting(s) might produce the best results for Caribbean day and/or night dives?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Skeptic14]

If you will be using ambient light only I would suggest you use the underwater modes. Another option, one I haven't used, is to do manual white balance. I've read it can be tricky and not extremely intuitive on the tg-4 though.

Shooting jpeg+RAW is a good idea, that way if the results from the camera aren't great you can do your own white balance on the RAW after the fact.

I've had really good luck using uw macro and uw1, I've yet to "need" to use a RAW to fix or improve a jpeg.

Do you know what the expected profiles of your dives will be? My wife uses a tg-3 unhoused and without strobes and in good vis (like the caribbean) and depths less than ~40ft it does spectacular. The colors will definitely become muted the deeper you go without a light source but if you are in macro mode and can get really close ~1ft you might be able to use the internal flash to bring back some color.

Deeperthoughts on these boards I believe uses a tg-4 housed without strobes and posts some great shots, so it may be worth sending a message and finding out a few pointers.

 

[Ayisha]

Thanks a lot!
UW Macro particularly and U/W 1 looked good to me as well. Will try them.
I'm on Blackbeard's, so I think the depths will mostly be mid-range, with deeper dives in the morning and shallower later in the day. Seems like there are a lot of 40 - 80 foot dives.
I will check with Deeperthoughts, thanks again!

 

[Ayisha]

I was using U/W Macro with some success, but it was hard to get a whole critter or coral in there and I had to really move far back. The captain of our boat, who also uses the TG-4, but with a macro lens, suggested that I keep it set on U/W Macro but zoom out. I did and zoomed it out around half way and that was a great setting.

The only thing was that in the U/W Macro setting, which is supposed to represent natural colours, the pictures were sometimes way too red and I had to do some post processing to remove the excessive red in the images. Easy enough to do though.

I tried the U/W Wide 1 for the shark dive and was not happy with that setting at all. The pics were very blue and I couldn't seem to do much with them with basic post processing. I've never worked with RAW but tried, and I couldn't seem to really improve them.

Some of my night shots were better since I used my dive light as a modelling light whereever I could. I used my dive light in some of the day shots as well.

Here are some of my pics in U/W Macro zoomed out, as well as some of my shark pics in U/W Wide 1:

 

[Ayisha]

Here are some more:

 

[Ayisha]

And a couple more:

 

[Skeptic14]

Looks like some nice dives, very good assortment of corals, sponges and marine life.

The macro setting definitely makes framing large subjects challenging, but zooming out a bit works. After just a few dives of seeing how close I needed to get for good lighting and then seeing how hard it was to frame scenes/subjects I bought a uwl-04 and it's helped in that regard.

Do you have any before/after examples of the images being too red before you post processed?

The three shark pics you posted look good, but I can see there being a couple of things that might have worked against you on that dive. The proximity of the sharks, the speed they were swimming by and using ambient only with a camera with a small sensor. I wonder how uw2 would have worked. If you look at the exif info for those images what is the shutter speed? If the camera was selecting a fast shutter speed because of the sharks movement than the sensor isn't going to get as much ambient light and if the dives were at decent depth I can see them being fairly blue.

Looks like a nice trip, would you recommend it?

 

[Ayisha]

I can see there being a couple of things that might have worked against you on that dive. The proximity of the sharks, the speed they were swimming by and using ambient only with a camera with a small sensor.

Bingo. They were swimming fast and got very close, which I needed for relatively clear pics.

If you look at the exif info for those images what is the shutter speed?

Shutter speed is 1/200. F-stop is 6.3.

When I used to use my old Olympus camera, I used to set the f-stop at 2.8 (the lowest choice) and let the camera choose the shutter speed, which I noticed was often 1/35, which seemed to be a good setting.

if the dives were at decent depth I can see them being fairly blue.

The dives were at about 60 feet, so yes, right again.

Do you have any before/after examples of the images being too red before you post processed?

Sure, this was the colour of many of the pics, unprocessed:



I reduced the red drastically down to these:



Eleutheras and the Exumas were decent, and the trip was fun, but Blackbeard's is small and isn't for everyone. I happened to win it (all-inclusive week on the liveaboard) in a 3 for $5 raffle, so that was awesome! My more favourite places to dive for colourful reef health and abundance of marine life are Jardines de la Reina, Cuba; and Turneffe and Glover cayes in Belize.

 

[Skeptic14]

Yeah, at 60ft and 1/200 with ambient only that's going to be tough, but I think the shark pics came out well still.

As far as the pics that were too red I think the before pics are fine, squirrel fish are pretty vivid red/orangish. The top row looks "natural" to me and the bottom row looks a little muted.

Very cool you won the trip from a raffle!