Blue Water Filter, there is an alternative!

[diversteve]

Not really, that's the way it's done with the TopDawg and other housings that don't have a flip-down filter.

Everything above 15' is generally yellowed when shooting thru a red filter in blue water and there will be some light falloff probably below about 60-80' also - that's where I generally flip mine up and deal with the blue later during editing - or not.

I'm not familiar with the filter you mention but it should probably be red and not orange. An old housing I had used a piece of red plastic filter material so I don't think that it's exactly critical to buy a URPro filter either.

 

[scubamut]

Makes sense. Being able to use or remove the filter according to depth would be an advantage. But I'll give it a try with the el-cheapo and see how it works.

 

[Empty V]

A question to the fundis: is there any reason that a filter fitted directly to the camera should not work? The reason I ask is that I've considered trying an orange filter such as the inexpensive Kood 37mm one on on my Canon HF100 in a Sealux housing.

Read my original post, having the filter inside the housing was my only solution because Equinox doesn't make a flip down or wet filter for my dome port. On top of that the thread size of my W/A adapter is 102mm and to have a custom filter made for that would be well over $600. I think I'll stick with $6.50 for 50 filters.

Here's another image comparison of what post color grading can do. This was a clip I grabbed from someone else's footage to show him how powerful the program is and how much better his own footage can look. I think it took a whole 30sec to grade this clip.

This is a video I shot in Hawaii with the gel setup. I also MWB:



Billy

 

[Empty V]

Everything above 15' is generally yellowed when shooting thru a red filter in blue water and there will be some light falloff probably below about 60-80' also - that's where I generally flip mine up and deal with the blue later during editing - or not.

That's really dependent on the camera and that it's white balance range is. I can MWB with the filter in place on the surface and everything looks normal. All of the wreck shots in the video in the previous post were between 90fsw and 120fsw. The deepest one was the Corsair and you can see by what little color I had to play with.

Billy

 

[Empty V]

Thanks for the info on the filters! I looked up the distributers for the Lee Filters on their web site and was able to pick one up locally.

Built a small housing for our home video camera and used the filter on our trip to the Philippines in May/June - the housing worked (to my surprise ) and the filter really helped bring out the colors.

We made a short video clip of our dives (has a still in it of me with the video camera from one of the dives:

YouTube - Aquaventure diving

Glad to help! Great looking vid with some nice photo-realistic colors. did you use the gel for all of the shots?

Billy

 

[TLB2]

Yes, I used the filter in all the dives and did not make any adjustments to the colors seen on the video. I saw some of my video in shallow water looked a bit odd with the colors being off, but anything over 20 foot or so looked really good - especially considering I didn't do any editing.

 

[KaitsuK]

Coming back to color correction methods (with filter or without): I did a very simple test in swimming pool, taking video without filter, with red filter and just by editing colors later on. Of course the this testing environment was not so ideal; depth in this pool is too shallow to use red filter, but anyway this short video gives an idea how effective different techiques can be.
YouTube - Testing underwater filter / white balance