Is it me or are these lacking some color?

[Byte Me]

This is my first UW effort on 4 dives over 2 days. Pictures are in reverse order of how I took them. After the first two dives I looked through all the pictures on the TV in the hotel room - was very surprised to see how much backscatter there was in what I thought was VERY clear water! So, day 2 no flash at all.

ISO was set at 200, most of these were shot with one of the three UW settings w/ manual WB which I was too freaking excited to remember to do so I had some post processing to do. Shot jpg and found out that Adobe Camera Raw does a really good job w/ jpgs. I was able to adjust everything I typically play with on RAW files.

Any comments or criticisms are welcome - especially hints!

byteme45/Vacation/PDC 2007/diving - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

 

[Tigerman]

My first thought was "how deep are these shot" (especially since I saw playa had posted a video about your diving too). And yes, they do seem a bit bleak. They also look like some of them have suffered quite badly from the lack of setting the manual WB properly, so that could be much of the issue?

 

[Byte Me]

Mostly shot between 25 - 40' or so. Mama Vina was deeper, between 60-85'.

I did have to play with color temp and tint settings to manually correct WB so that could have something to do with it.

 

[pakman]

Yes, the colors are lacking. I think you answered the question yourself as you mentioned you turned off the flash (but that wouldn't help on those wide angle shots as you saw how much backscatter you got).

Since you're using a SP-350 which supports RAW and you are using photoshop, I would strongly recommend shooting in RAW. While ACR 4 allows you to do "RAW style" adjustments on jpg's, it's best to just shoot in RAW and and adjust the RAW files.

Also, when shooting RAW, you can just forget about MWB and leave it on AWB and tweak the white balance in ACR.

As you get more familiar with your camera, also start getting used to shooting in full manual or aperture priority. Looking at the exif info on some of your shots, the camera setting were f/4 aperture & 1/400s shutter... Maybe start out with aperture priority around f5. If the camera sets too low of a shutter speed, then up the ISO.


edit: on that seahorse shot, I think you were close enough to use the internal flash without worrying about backscatter. That would have really made the colors pop.

 

[diversteve]

Your hues seem off on a lot of them also. The water should look blue and the sand white. On a lot of your shots the sand seems to have a greenish cast and the water is looking lavender or violet.

I color corrected one of them and tried 2-3 others but I couldn't improve them.

To change this one I played around with the hue, decreased the saturation slightly and then went into color balance and pushed the reds about +10 in the midtone range.

It made the water blue and made the fish less monotone:

 

[Byte Me]

Thanks guys! All very helpful stuff. I'll have to remember this in 6 months when I get back UW! Until then I'm going to spend more time above water getting used to the settings and working them quickly.