Repairs possible for way off white balance?

[amajamar]

Did you use a flash on the "real bad" photo? In the upper right I can see a little red leading me to believe you did. Your camera most likely set you wb to flash since it was used, leaving everything blue since it was a wide angle shot.

I believe I did. The problem is that on that particular dive I thought I would "adjust" the white balance on the white sandy bottom. I couldn't tell if it worked or not. When I look at the LCD display it always looks reddish and washed out. I have to take it on faith if the pics are good or bad. Unfortunately, I could not review on a nightly basis, as I didn't have a laptop that would download from my camera...

 

[vondo]

What kind of camera do you have? If you have one of the Canon Powershots, you might be able to hack the firmware and use RAW anyway. The RAW is pretty noisy, but it does give you more latitude in fixing the WB.

I tried to find a couple of images that are similar to yours. Here's what I came up with, uncorrected straight out of the camera and then a fixed version. I use UFRAW which is a free program for linux and perhaps other OSes. As a starting point I use auto WB and auto black level which fixes the "haze" left over.

 

[vondo]

I believe I did. The problem is that on that particular dive I thought I would "adjust" the white balance on the white sandy bottom. I couldn't tell if it worked or not. When I look at the LCD display it always looks reddish and washed out. I have to take it on faith if the pics are good or bad. Unfortunately, I could not review on a nightly basis, as I didn't have a laptop that would download from my camera...

I would guess you used the flash too. The "problem" is that in this shot, you've got two different white balances. More than that, actually. First you've got the piece of the wreck which is almost normal since the flash reached it. You can see that because even though it's pretty dark there, you have areas of red. Then you've got the WB of your subject which is sunlight filtered by however deep you are plus about 5m(?) of water from the subject to you. Then you've got the background and foreground which are however deep you are plus their distances, say 3-10m. It's going to be really tough to correct the whole picture without having a pink foreground or a blue background or both.

I'm just starting this process myself (two trips with my P&S). I think half the "wisdom" is going to be in learning which shots I can get on flash memory and which I should just capture with "meat memory".

 

[sasscuba]

This is the best I could do and am really happy with this one.

 

[amajamar]

What kind of camera do you have? If you have one of the Canon Powershots, you might be able to hack the firmware and use RAW anyway. The RAW is pretty noisy, but it does give you more latitude in fixing the WB.

I tried to find a couple of images that are similar to yours. Here's what I came up with, uncorrected straight out of the camera and then a fixed version. I use UFRAW which is a free program for linux and perhaps other OSes. As a starting point I use auto WB and auto black level which fixes the "haze" left over.

I have a Powershot A620. When you say the RAW is noisy isn't that something that can be cleaned up with PS?

 

[amajamar]

sasscuba,

That looks good! Is it possible to get the blue areas less blue and more sand color? Or is the WB too far gone for that?

 

[vondo]

I have a Powershot A620. When you say the RAW is noisy isn't that something that can be cleaned up with PS?

I have an A620 as well. I'm not sure what PhotoShop's capabilities are since I don't use it, but I'd be suprised if it couldn't. I hear on photography boards that "Noise Ninja" is the end-all, be-all of noise reduction.

I do a little attempt at noise reduction in my UFRAW workflow. Seems to work halfway decently.

 

[sasscuba]

sasscuba,

That looks good! Is it possible to get the blue areas less blue and more sand color? Or is the WB too far gone for that?

I tried and that is the best I could come up with.

 

[amajamar]

I tried and that is the best I could come up with.

Great! Now, how did you do it??

 

[Web Monkey]

I made 10 dives in Aruba last week and have many pics. However, I am a relative beginner to UW photography and dealing with white balance is a major problem for me. Is there a way to correct white balance after the fact? My camera does not shoot in RAW, so I hope there is way to make things at least a little better.

I have PS Elements 2.0. Is there any other software that is better for repairs of white balance?

Thanks in advance!

the amount of "fixing" that's possible depends entirely if the data is actually present in the image.

If you're down deep enough that the reds are gone, no software in the world will bring them back.

If you want to try playing with them yourself, for free, Google's Picasa actually does a really nice job and costs nothing.

Terry