Does use of "Magic filter" make sense on DSLR?

[rjsimp]

Gilligan,

This photo was taken with the magic filter installed on my 12-24mm lense and strobes. It works just fine if you are in raw. You can always re-adjust white balance if necessary in post and get the effect of the filter. So, if you are shooting with a strobe, do it and correct in post. Turn your strobes off and shoot natural light.. again, you can correct in post.

So, it does work just fine even with a strobe. You have two options. White balance in sunlight before your dive and the filter is on. This will give you your strobe setting. Then when you are ready to go natural, you can white balance at depth without the strobes. This will work if you have multiple manual white balance settings, otherwise you are going to be shooting natural light for the rest of the dive. With my D200, I didn't bother. I just white balanced in sunlight and shot everything with the filter (with strobe and without) and then corrected the WB if necessary in post.

 

[Manta Buddy]

Wow! Now this is getting interesting. We have two schools of thought on Magic Filter. One is that it limits you to no strobes even for macro, another that you'd still get better colors overall if you have to shoot WA, fish portraits and macro on the same dive.
Thank you all who contributed to defining the spectum of opinions and sharing your experiences. Thank you for the pictures and links.
Following the link on Original Magic Filters that Gudge had sent, I found a page about using strobes and Magic Filters:
http://www.magic-filters.com/tips/flash.html
This pretty much confirms the technique that rjsimp had described.

Would it be possible to get more input on your experiences, including our Pro Photographers?

 

[AndyT]

Rich

Am I reading your post correctly ? You white balanced your camera topside in sunlight with the filter on ?

Not criticising , just keen to learn . I am considering buying Magic Filters and found your method very interesting. Thanks for undertaking the experiment and sharing.

 

[Larry C]

That's really interesting, Rich. I had thought about trying my green water filter with strobes, but the whole shot comes out red. On the other hand, you can adjust out the red in post processing easier than the assorted shades of blue and green I imagine. I hadn't thought of white balancing for the strobe, generally I just use the auto WB.

 

[rjsimp]

Andy,

Yes, when I did it, I white balanced the "Manual" mode of the camera to a white towel on the surface in daylight. Since strobes are supposed to be close or equal to daylight I figured this would get me close so I could at least check colors when shooting with strobes. Then when I shot underwater, everything looked good. If I shot without strobes, you could switch over to "Shutter Priority" mode and white balance there or just shoot on whatever white balance you want really since it can be fixed in post production. The filter has already done what it needed to so when you fix the white balance you will have a very nice natural light shot. Keep in mind, this is all in RAW only, not JPG.

Larry,

You really should never use auto WB, especially with strobes under water (of course with RAW you could fix it ). The camera sees the blue (or green) and tries to adjust for that, then the strobe fires and you end up with way too much red in your shot. You should pick a fixed WB setting. I use cloudy becuase it seems to give the colors a bit more punch (I like to shoot in the mode that will require the least amount of post work if possible). Doing the same thing with the green filter though should work the same, just don't use auto WB for any shooting under water (with or without filter).

 

[Manta Buddy]

Rich,

Thank you very much for sharing results of your experiments in great detail. I'm definitely going for Magic Filters and excited to experiment myself now

Safe Diving!

Denis

 

[alcina]

Just remember, when you shoot in RAW you can change your white balance to your heart's content. RAW means the camera doesn't choose things...even things you set. Setting it allows you to see it when you shoot, but the data is not actually saved as "daylight" or "tungsten" etc as it would be in jpeg- it's saved as RAW and you still have full control.