What tools to use to adjust underwater photos

Blogged by Simon on January 29, 2010 2:53pm | Last updated by Simon on February 07, 2010 2:41pm | Pages: 1 2

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As a prerequisite, I always color calibrate my screen before working on any photos. Mac OSX ships with ColorSync, a built in utility that serves exactly this purpose and it is especially important to use when doing work on an older LCD or tube. Nothing is more frustrating than spending time on adjustments only to see the image look washed out or too dark somewhere else.

At home, I use a 17″ MacBook Pro paired up with a new 24″ cinema LED screen, both of which automatically calibrate. Apple’s LED cinema displays have far superior contrast and color reproduction than any LCD screen I have ever seen. There are many good reasons to get a Mac, and this is one of them.

Aperture

Apple retails Aperture, a non destructive image editing platform for the Mac for US$199.- Non destructive means, the software maintains all adjustments separately and they can be removed anytime without destroying your original. Aperture is capable of reading the native imagine files (“.nef”) of my Nikon D300 camera, and I use it to import, label and process all my raw material.

Without going into too much detail here, I simply create an album for each photo shoot and sort them by date. Everyone will have their own way of working this out, but I personally use the star rating system to bump up pictures I’m working on as I go, so better or improved pictures get more stars. When you shoot lots of bracketed exposures, volume control for raw images becomes important, there are simply too many shots to deal with. I will typically screen all my raw images first thing after import and give the better ones a star, that way I don’t look at the other ones again afterwards.

Once done screening, I adjust the images for basic corrections. This includes straightening, crop, exposure, color temperature and recovery of burnt out highlights, for all of which there are separate sliders available in the software. I recommend trying things out, and find out what each of the sliders do, using your own images. Find things that work for you, image editing is all about showing people what it is you saw in the photo to begin with.

If basic adjustments aren’t enough, there is an increasing amount of plug-ins available for Aperture, all of which work natively, so you don’t have to leave the software. Note that while these plug-ins can be very useful, some of them will overwrite the original raw image you imported. I recommend ticking ‘Create new version when making adjustments’ under Aperture/Preferences/General to prevent this from happening, and keeping an adjustment history as you go.

Fisheye Hemi

I’m using the Fisheye Hemi plug-in to correct for barrel distortion when taking pictures with the Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens. While barrel distortion can be a cool effect, it quickly becomes overbearing, especially when you are extremely close to your subject. At US$29.- this is a very reasonably priced plug-in and Fisheye Hemi does a decent job at reverting barrel distortion. Using the ‘Hemi 2′ method worked best for me on the Nikon 10.5mm, however I still have to experiment with shots from the new Tokina 10-17mm. Since the angle of view is similar, I expect the lens to behave identical, at least at the 10mm end.

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