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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Noise Ninja

Noise Ninja is a de-noise filter for low light or high ISO shots that retails at US$79.- I’m using it on some of my underwater photography at ISO 400, sometimes already at ISO 200. Obviously, the lower your ISO and the better your strobe usage, the less noise you will experience, however I still find plenty of use for this. Noise Ninja has separate sliders for chroma noise (which is mainly camera chip noise at low light), and luminance noise which, combined with the radius slider, can be useful against finer grained backscatter.

Silver Efex Pro

For creating black&white images, I highly recommend using Silver Efex Pro. At US$199 it is not a cheap plug-in, but I find the controls for creating black and white images very fine grained and useful. I love the color filters that help you accentuate a certain range and the different film types are interesting to try (though I never was much of a film photographer myself).

Color Efex Pro

Nik Software also publishes the very useful Color Efex Pro which contains 52 filters, such as a polarizer, color temperature, graduated grey and color filters, glow, soft focus and more. This is maybe my favourite plug-in for Aperture and I often use it’s foliage filter to add local color contrast to small things like Butterflyfish. Great collection of filters, albeit a bit pricey at US$299.- for the entire set.

Photoshop

If I can’t do something in Aperture or one of it’s plug-ins, I edit a copy of the picture in Adobe Photoshop CS4. This will typically be things that involve drawing a mask, fine grained pixel work at higher zoom levels, or using one of Photoshop’s many excellent filters on parts of the image. Using Photoshop will be the final step in my editing process, and i’m trying not to make a rule of using it (I’m simply not a fan of brush work). Photoshop is a powerful, comprehensive tool, retailing for US$699.- in the standard edition.

(Please note, I am not affiliated with any software vendors and this page has not been sponsored or endorsed by any of the parties mentioned)

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