Bubble Coral Macro Structure

Blogged by Simon on January 26, 2010 11:21am | Last updated by Simon on February 20, 2010 11:58pm | Category: Underwater Photography | Get a Print Get a Print |

Bubble Coral Macro StructureWhat do you do when you’ve got your 105mm macro lens on and there are no fish in sight? You shoot coral surface structures – never ending variations of color, texture and form. These are called bubble coral (Plerogyra sp.), but they almost look like inverse thumb prints or finger digits to me (or maggots).

This photo has a fair amount of postprocessing done to it to bring out the surface structure. Let’s start with the basics: camera was set to f/16, exposed for 1/60s with ISO 200. The original color shot has the same champagne tone but is a lot brighter.

First, I went into Color Efex Pro for Aperture and applied selective brightness over the image to tone down some highlights (no iTTL used).

Next, I changed over to Silver Efex Pro and created a black and white version of the same shot. In the process, I increased structure plus fifty percent which enhances the local contrast and increases the strength of the surface texture. I already liked the black and white version, but wanted to bring the champagne tone of the original image back, so I opened up both, the black and white version (as background) and the original image in Photoshop to merge both layers.

I set blending options for the champagne layer to “overlay” and opacity to half, which marries the structure of the black and white background layer with the original color, giving the image more depth, yet preserving the original look.

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  1. Jason Heller
    on January 27th, 2010
    1

    Great image Simon. The processing approach you used is a great way to bring out the texture. Good job!

  2. Simon
    on January 27th, 2010
    2

    Thanks Jason! For lack of a better analogy, it’s basically like a pencil underdrawing, and works best for super macro. Glad you like the results.

  3. Gary
    on February 10th, 2010
    3

    Hi Simon

    Love the texture on this one, what camera are you using?

  4. Simon
    on February 10th, 2010
    4

    Hi Gary, all photos on this website are shot with a Nikon D300. Check out the gear page for details.

    Cheers,

    Simon

  5. Squid | Underwater Photography Blog by Simon Mittag
    on June 23rd, 2010
    5

    [...] treated this in a similar way to the bubble coral, where a dual tone version of the photo is overlayed with a black&white version of itself, [...]

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