After every dive there is a ritual of downloading the photographs to the pc, bagging and tagging, discarding the bad shots and labelling the keepers. This ritual is best done with a fast interface like USB-2 or Firewire and a cataloging/viewing software like View NX or Adobe Bridge or Lightroom or whatever you like to use. I use View NX due to simplicity and efficiency it provides.

After downloading, i catalog , tag and classify, this is very important as the number of photographs that you take increases, it becomes difficult to find how many loggerhead turtle photographs that you have.

 

I use a general setup file for tags and add delete as necessary. After this operation digital editing or the workflow commences. I have experimented with lots of software products for this challenge including GIMP (a very good open source alternative), Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop CS3 etc. You can select the one which suits your needs and budget but i decideed to use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Capture NX and the workflow is based on that. The image below is directly out of the camera without modifications.

 

 

  

First step is to make a copy of the original file and work on the copy, always keep the original intact, this will give you more creative freedom without ruining your shot. I shoot in Nikon RAW format which is called NEF and open my files in Capture NX first. I always start with checking the histogram of the image, the histogram must be evenly distributed bell shaped curve. If the histogram is close to the left the photograph is underexposed and if it is leaned to the right that shows the opposite situation, making the photograph overexposed. The exposure problem can be fixed up to -1 or +1 f-stop but there is a price to pay (noise).

We can deal with the noise using noise elimination software later.

After correcting the exposure, we take a quick look at the White Balance, shooting in RAW gives you the flexibility to change the WB to your liking without destroying the image. I usually use the method of sampling a well lit portion of the reef for the white balance with the WB correction tool. If you have a white surface like a slate or some piece of equipment you can use it as well. After changing the white balance i save the file as NEF and convert to TIFF to switch to Photoshop.

I open the TIFF file in photoshop, if necessary i crop the picture by using a cropping tool and then check and do a quick corner burn if necessary. Corner Burning is a neat trick, i perform it by duplicating the background layer, selecting a fair sized rectangle inside the photograph, using Feather command for rounding the edges of the selection, changing the blending mode of the layer to Multiply and flattening the layers. This burns the corners and pops-out the main subject.

After this step i perform some color balancing magic, by using selective color and adjusting the sliders for the channels REDS, YELLOWS and NEUTRALS. In these channels i usually increase the lost red colour, yellows and blacks until i obtain the colors that i have seen underwater.  As the last step i perform the sharpening, here i use either a sharpening mask and selectively sharpen or a general unsharp mask.

Here we almost have the final image. Save the TIFF file and convert to JPG if it is suitable for your purpose.