Stabilizer or faster lens?

[olegk]

Sorry for double-posting - I didn't notice the 2nd page.

I uploaded lots of recent photos here: Underwater in Eilat (2014)
If you are trying to judge quality, please look at "full-size" images (well, downsized to 2560 at larger dimension).
Note that the colors are improved in the last third - starting from DSC03545. First two thirds shot with FLD filter and WB measured off gray target; last third shot with FLB filter and WB measured off white target. It's Eilat (Israel), and the water appears to me as blue.
Everything is ISO400, exposure compensation -0.7, RAW processed with little noise reduction. Smooth areas are noisy, but the main problem was motion blur - I threw away too many photos. Still I think I won't like any more noise.

What I don't feel is that I need a lens any wider. The set of pictures comes from 6 dives; the lens was at 19mm for 5 of them and at 21mm (by accident) at the one with the sunk ship. 21mm is too narrow, but 18-19mm feels optimal to me.
I guess the urge for wider lens comes from using strobes and thus being able to illuminate only nearby region.
The available-light underwater technique has a different restriction - you can capture only a limited depth range with correct color, but it doesn't hurt to include more horizontally. If the shot spans significant range of depths, there is a clear color gradient. Another restriction: at large depths you cannot portray the color of the water - you make it "magentish" to keep your subject correctly colored.

 

[Interceptor121]

The benefit of wider lens is that when you get closer to the subject the total light path is shortened this improves colors. The reasons why your images turn out magenta is because they are backlit so you can't white balance with the colour picker. Looks like you need to look more closely to color rendering in water and basic underwater optics of you want to improve your images as well as composition a lot of the shots are taken pointing down which is ok for video but not for stills

 

[Storker]

Everything is ISO400, exposure compensation -0.7, RAW processed with little noise reduction. Smooth areas are noisy, but the main problem was motion blur - I threw away too many photos. Still I think I won't like any more noise.

Don't be so afraid of a little noise, motion blur is usually a lot worse unless you use the slow shutter speed for creative motion blur. With my aging Nikon D300, I routinely go to 800 with no second thoughts, with my OM-D E-M5 I go to 1600. For both cameras I allow myself to go even higher if that's needed to get sharp pictures.

Regarding the color, turn down the magenta in your color correction. A greenish/blueish hue is a lot better than a magenta hue, since the underwater world is blue/green, not magenta.

And, as Interceptor121 says: WA allows you to get closer. One of the first rules of UW photo is: Go as close as you can. Then go closer.

 

[Tigerman]

Another thing to remember is also that if you get a wider lens, even if you dont shoot wider than the one you currently allow, it will shoot sharper at the same focal length.
Zooms tend to lose sharpness at the extreme ends

 

[String]

A faster lens is always going to be better over stabilisation. Quite simply, IS can to an extent counter YOUR movement but it cant counter everything else moving and underwater, EVERYTHING moves. Small fish, large fish, plants, soft corals the lot so its worthless. A faster lens is needed but even that is eventually going to have limits. You'll need to up the ISO or just accept conditions are beyond the cameras capabilities.

What I don't feel is that I need a lens any wider. The set of pictures comes from 6 dives; the lens was at 19mm for 5 of them and at 21mm (by accident) at the one with the sunk ship. 21mm is too narrow, but 18-19mm feels optimal to me
I guess the urge for wider lens comes from using strobes and thus being able to illuminate only nearby region.
The available-light underwater technique has a different restriction - you can capture only a limited depth range with correct color, but it doesn't hurt to include more horizontally. If the shot spans significant range of depths, there is a clear color gradient. Another restriction: at large depths you cannot portray the color of the water - you make it "magentish" to keep your subject correctly colored.

Not true. With U/W photography both with and without strobes your aim is to reduce that water column distance as much as possible, arguably its MORE important for ambient light as its your only source of red. Remember the total absorption of light is from the surface to the subject AND from the subject to you. Anything you can do in order to reduce that camera to subject distance is going to improve colour rendition, contrast and clarity. 19-21mm is way too narrow for U/W reefscape and fish shots.

I do a lot of ambient light photography and looking at lightroom 98% of my shots are at 10mm on my 10-17 lens.
Ultimately ambient light photography with decent colour rendition requires shallow depths for shooting in. Theres no point going deeper. Filters wont help you and all they're doing is reducing the amount of light getting into the camera resulting in a slower shutter speed or higher ISO. I find magenta really destroys a picture. It screams "artificial". You're better off with a realistica green/blue than that. Sometimes desaturating the magenta/red channel works or desaturating the whole image helps.

Looking at the list of photos you put up again the probles seem to be lack of contrast, clarity and colour due to being too far away and a lot of the time the subject is dark and shaded. You really do need the sun behind you with ambient light photography. I know its not helped by the amount of white, reflective dead coral around Eilat but sometimes you just have to accept a certain subject is not going to come out so give up on it and find something else.

A noisy image can (i) be cleaned and (ii) isn't as bad anyway as a blurred image. Also go for ISO over motion blur. Personally for ambient light i wont go below 1/100th at all, sometimes higher depending on subject.

 

[CT Sean]

Sorry for double-posting - I didn't notice the 2nd page.

I uploaded lots of recent photos here: Underwater in Eilat (2014)

Which specifically are you saying have motion blur problems? I looked at a few and they seemed OK. Some under exposed, some missed focus, lots of edge softness (assuming due to the port) but not seeing a lot of motion blur (unless you just didn't include any that had it)

You say you are shooting in RAW, what are you using to process them? Based on the current processed results, I think there's a lot of room for improvement on the processing side.

 

[olegk]

Wow, so many constructive replies!
I deleted the photos that were too much blurred; too many of such.

So far I'm concentrating on getting acceptable-to-good colors, that's why I included otherwise not too interesting photos. I really need your color-related feedback.

The processing done with Corel Aftershot Pro. There's no good automatic noise reduction, and I'm too lazy to choose the parameters manually. At least for now.

I tried to tweak color-balance to force more green over magenta, but to my taste the results were worse.

I agree with the claim that each method has restrictions, and ambient light UW photography can portray the color of UW objects but not the color of the water - unless we are above ~10m. So, as was said, some compositions just won't work.

Of course, next time I'll try to adhere to more advises on where the sun should be; though I don't fully understand that. When you are at 20-30m, the light comes mostly from above, doesn't it?

Regarding the contrast: when I look at my photos on a color-calibrated screen, I feel I was able to keep it the way it looks like during the dive. The light is diffused at large depth, and the contrast shouldn't be too strong. In the end of the day I'm not trying to resemble popular screen-savers .

And another question: if you look only at the last third of my photos - starting from DSC03545 and on, are the colors improved vs the earlier pictures? Maybe I'm not too picky, but it's something I already can live with.

Thanks for your great help,
Oleg.

 

[CT Sean]

Wow, so many constructive replies!
I deleted the photos that were too much blurred; too many of such.

So far I'm concentrating on getting acceptable-to-good colors, that's why I included otherwise not too interesting photos. I really need your color-related feedback.

The processing done with Corel Aftershot Pro. There's no good automatic noise reduction, and I'm too lazy to choose the parameters manually. At least for now.

I tried to tweak color-balance to force more green over magenta, but to my taste the results were worse.

Don't know anything about that software. How are you "tweaking" color balance? Are you setting a custom white balance - doing it manually? using an eye dropper tool? Are you adjusting it with a tool other than white balance (if you are you probably shouldn't be)?

Perhaps you could upload a RAW file somewhere that any bored parties could attempt to play with and see what kind of results we can get? I played around with one or two of the jpgs and think I got much better results out of Lightroom than you got out of Aftershot - and that was without everything RAW offers. I attached a sample (the Lightroom side looks cleaner in the non-composite version - it would look better still if NR was applied to the RAW vs downsized jpg)

Of course, next time I'll try to adhere to more advises on where the sun should be; though I don't fully understand that. When you are at 20-30m, the light comes mostly from above, doesn't it?

Regarding the contrast: when I look at my photos on a color-calibrated screen, I feel I was able to keep it the way it looks like during the dive. The light is diffused at large depth, and the contrast shouldn't be too strong. In the end of the day I'm not trying to resemble popular screen-savers

.

And another question: if you look only at the last third of my photos - starting from DSC03545 and on, are the colors improved vs the earlier pictures? Maybe I'm not too picky, but it's something I already can live with.

Thanks for your great help,
Oleg.

The sunlight comes from where the sun is - just like on dry land. It might be more diffuse under water, but it still has a basic direction. If you're facing east in the morning, you're shooting into the sun - on dry land or otherwise.

The last handful of photos do look better than the rest for accurate color - pretty safe to say due to the obvious shallow depth.

 

[String]

Good example above of processing. Lightroom has the green feel which is much less distracting and accurate than psychedelic magenta. Even at 20-30m (where i wouldnt bother with ambient light photography generally as results will likely be very low quality on any camera), unless its the middle of the day or cloudy the sun will be at an angle. The earlier or later in the day the more of an angle. You absolutely have to keep that sun behind your shoulder to get the best out of ambient light shots.

The deeper you go the worse the magenta problem (AND the noise in the image) will be if you try to manually correct if you're trying to get foreground correct. Most noise lies in the red channel and by massively adjusting that to try to correct a balance where almost none is present greatly amplifies that noise so its not just a factor of ISO here. Best bet for deep shots if you insist on trying them is to leave a green/blue hue to the image then desaturate it to remove colour. Then dial up the contrast a bit to make up for it. That way you're not increasing a noisy channel trying to get detail for something that simply isnt present.

On the subject of contrast, its not just diffused light from the surface, the more crap inbetween you and the subject the more it'll get further absorbed and spread out so the less contrast and sharpness you'll get. Thats why a wide angle lense is absolutely essential for shots underwater. When im teaching workshops one of the tasks i give them is to fill the frame (ie get as close as possible zoomed out) to an object, ambient light and take a shot. Back off, take a shot using the same frame filling but zooming so further away and again as far away as possible but zoomed in full.
What they get are 3 images with the same subject, the same size, the only difference is distance. What you find is colour rendition, contrast and clarity are massively different.

You simply aren't going to get accurate colour below about 6-10m as you cant balance and correct in post something which simply isn't there on the sensor.

 

[olegk]

Regarding the processing alternative, it's obvious that water bulk looks better in Mr. CT Sean's approach. But the color of the diver in my "original" is closer to the reality. That's the restriction of the method - you cannot have both. E.g. with ambient-light UW, it's better to have less background. On land this would mean longer lens.

Regarding the colors at depths: red is there waiting to be extracted with proper filter and processing. Below are my dive-log data for the last sets of images - those taken with FLB filter. As to me the colors are more than acceptable even below 20m. Again, colors of the subjects, while water-made background should have been reduced.
DSC03545 15.39
DSC03548 17.88
DSC03554 26.75
DSC03561 28.40
DSC03563 29.21
DSC03572 27.87
DSC03579 24.54
DSC03583 23.50
DSC03586 22.30
DSC03588 21.44
DSC03592 14.66
DSC03602 5.55
DSC03605 5.28
DSC03610 5.02
DSC03614 4.30
DSC03620 4.34
DSC03628 3.94
DSC03632 2.8
DSC03651 29.09
DSC03665 28.73
DSC03670 25.84
DSC03673 25.16
DSC03677 22.8
DSC03680 22.55
DSC03682 23.20
DSC03686 27.28
DSC03692 28.16
DSC03697 27.90
DSC03713 16.89
DSC03716 16.12
DSC03717 15.9
DSC03719 13.48
DSC03724 13.82
DSC03725 13.72
DSC03727 13.70
DSC03729 13.70
DSC03731 13.58
DSC03735 13.26
DSC03743 13.32
DSC03746 13.40