How to adjust underwater photos in Aperture

Blogged by Simon on February 02, 2010 5:23pm | Last updated by Simon on February 16, 2010 5:08pm | Pages: 1 2

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This is a walkthrough of adjustments I make to an underwater photo in Aperture, i.e. rotate, crop, level adjust and vignetting. These are simple steps you can follow to improve a variety of your own images. The Whitetip Soldierfish is a pretty average shot, and as such makes a good example – let’s have a look.

Original Photo

I took this shot about 2m away from the subject with the 105mm macro lens. This guy was hiding under a rocky ledge and it was difficult getting close, so I opted for a distance shot with more flash power. First, the good parts: the image is sharp and the subject is big enough including good overall detail, which is a big plus as all that is hard to fix, if missing. On the bad side, the tail fin is cut off which hurts composition, the colors are a tad washed out, and the lighting is flat, both background and foreground are evenly bright. Time for some fixing up, let’s get started.

Step 1: Rotate And Crop

What I want to do first is improve the compositional issues, then move on to other aspects of the image. To make the best of the cut off tail fin, we rotate the image -6 degrees in Aperture. Obviously we won’t get the fin back, but lucky for us missing bits, in line with body shape, always look better when they fade into a corner. Note how the fin is now symmetrically cropped on both sides of the subject and it looks like we actually intended it to be this way.

Also, in the rotated image it now looks like the fish just swam out of the corner into the center of the image, which draws attention to the middle of our frame. As a rule of thumb, subjects should always look like they swim into your frame, not away from it.

With only a slight adjustment, our photo already looks more pleasingly composed. It is also noteworthy that the further you rotate, the more pixels fall victim to cropping, so use this sparingly before you end up zooming in too much and begin losing sharpness.

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