White Balance Will Change Everything!

[InnerWorld Images]

Want to get rid of your U/W Photo "Blues?" Well here is the simplest and most valuable answer...White Balance underwater at depth.
Your camera has an eye and a brain. Just like us when we submerge the color spectrum is altered for your camera. But unlike us, we need artificial light to return the spectrum and see true colors, your camera can be adjusted. White Balancing means telling your camera that "This IS White Now" wherever you are. So you can bring a white card for underwater use, or a blank white slate, or you can even use your hand...And the natural colors will be returned. Now you do this for the depth you are photographing at...if that depth changes by more than 10'/3m you need to do it again. For most dives this means twice usually.
Find your White Balance feature button or menu option. Read you manual, I know you actually have to read it for 10 seconds. Figure out the simple process. Then go to depth, fill the screen with your white card or hand and hit the function button to preset/custom white balance. If you are using a strobe then shoot at full power. If you are in shallow water and shooting natural light then try it without a strobe. It's great if you don't yet own a strobe! To see examples and read more tips and tricks, visit innerworldimages{dot}com

 

[Mariozi]

Hi, beg your pardon on to disagree?

Thats seems an extract from the PADI DUP - Digital UW Photographer specialty... Which has it's value, but it is too simplistic of a view.

When I teach uwphoto one part of my course is called "The truth about WB" because I feel I have to tell my students how to proper choose their "brushes" when they "paint with light".

WB is a great tool to correct for Color Temperature.
Which has to do with the source of light.
Color Temperature is based on a theoretical perfect black body, one that does not reflect any light.
If we heat this object it will start to glow, initially red then orange, yellow, white, bluish, purple... all light fonts have color temperature as one of it's characteristics and the WB setting is best used to correct for that.

"Underwater Blues" scientific name is called Selective Color Absorption and has little to do with Color Temperature (except by the blue cast) as it filters different colors at different distances from the light source (depth or flash distance). High Color Temperature light sources (blue ones) still have all the color spectrum in them (although at different values for each color) while at depths we might run out of some colors depending on depth/water quality.

In the past 50 years (just counting from the creation of the Nikonos line of cameras) we have been shooting underwater and achieving amazing results with the WB stuck at "daylight". The most used films for UWPhoto were "daylight" films.

With the arrival of the digital imaging technology in uwphotography people started making a huge fuss about WB. But we might consider that UWPhoto is "Natural/Wildlife Photography" normally where deviations from the natural expected results should sometimes be avoided: The sea IS blue, it is supposed to be blue and we should try make it beautifully blue (as we have been doing for the last decades).

To correct for SCA we have many tools, many "brushes" that we use to "paint with light".
- The most powerful one are Strobes, for they restore the full spectrum of color up to 1m distance from them AND keep the background naturally blue (or green).
- Filters (Magic Filters) are very good ones in the specific conditions (depth and water quality) they were designed to be used in. The weak part of their use is when you vary these conditions, for filters only "select" how much of each color reach the sensor, but they cannot "create" colors where they don't exist (like red at depths greater than 20m for example).
- WB is just the cheapest one, and in my opinion the weakest one when used alone, for it is the one that causes the most "distortion" of the natural look of the blue background. They are best used in conjunction with filters.

I normally dive with WB set at daylight or cloudy for WA and Fish, sometimes when I'm doing only Macro I use it at the flash color temperature (which can be found on the strobe user manual most of the time).

Like I say, WB is just a "brush", not good or bad. Good when properly applied, Bad when ignored or used in excess (unless you are trying to "create a language" in your images).

Good Luck

 

[drbill]

Beautiful images accomplishing through MWB give non-divers and new divers a false impression about what the environment actually looks like. I don't use MWB in my videos for this reason. Well, to be honest, my 10-year old housing can't do it. Sigh!

 

[InnerWorld Images]

I was simply making a point to new photographers that may not have a strobe or understand they have "This Tool" custom White balance, in their toolbox.

 

[bvanant]

If you shoot in raw you can easily adjust the white balance after the dive. Lightroom makes this particularly simple. To Dr. Bill's point, I think that most UW photographers use a bit too much saturation to give the impression that all this really cool blue color is there.
Bill

 

[fppf]

WB is a great tool, to a point.
As was pointed out, once you reach a certain depth the color is no longer there to pick up.

Also, depending on the sensitivity of the camera, as you correct more and more for the reds the image will start to get noisy and grainy. This is because the camera must amplify those colors that are being absorbed by the water.

The best compromise is using a manual filter up front, then manual white balance to finish off the job. The filter will lower shooting light levels though, as it absorbs the rest of the spectrum to make up for the missing reds.

When using a flash the WB should be set to the color of the flash. Most strobes will wash out any ambient light at even shallow depths.

 

[Doc Harry]

I've never really had much luck with manual WB. The photos are still pretty bad.

I prefer to make color corrections using techniques such as the Mandrake process that you can automate in Adobe Photoshop.

If you use manual WB correction at depth, I found that it is much more difficult to correct the color, and the Mandrake process is useless.

 

[strobeless]

Mariozi, thanks so much for your post. After finally getting a better camera I thought that WB adjusting would be great benefit. I was dismayed that with underwater photos it did not help at all, and went right back to doing all my adjusting in Photoshop (albeit, with much more image info at hand.) I was well aware of the color drop off you illustrated but didn't understand the science of how WB color temperature did not factor in. It makes much more sense to me now.

 

[Mariozi]

Glad it helped