Underwater photos, equipment, recreational and technical diving blog

Lighting up the Darkness Underwater

I got this recently in my inbox from B&H Photo Video in New York

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/find/newsLetter/Darkness.jsp

The Underwater Photograhper

I’ve just added a new book to my collection – The Underwater Photographer by Martin Edge (amazon link).  It has a wealth of information about Underwater Photography covering mainly digital techniques and certainly has given me some things to think about when taking pictures.  Some of the areas in covers include lenses, zoom, digital file formats, digial ISO, noise and much more. 

Well worth a read.

Loading the Underwater action in Photoshop CS3

I see for the stats on the my blog a few people have searched for instructions as to how to install the underwater action into Photoshop CS3.  Something I should have posted orignally so here they are:

1: Open up Photoshop and display the action panel.  You can do this by clicking on Window -> Action or by pressing Alt+F9.

2: You should see default actions as the only action folder in that window.  You can load an action from anywhere it does not need to be in a particular folder for Photoshop to recognise it.  So, just below the close button on that window you should see a down arrow with 3 line next to it, click that and a menu will appear.

3: From that menu, select Load Actions.  Navigate to the folder where you action is and select Load.  You action will be loaded into Photoshop.

Simple as that.

Download: Underwater action for Photoshop CS3

Here is the download for the Underwater action for Photoshop CS3.  It’s freeware and available to download from here or from the Adobe Photoshop Exchange

The action is by James Connell

Editing Underwater Photos with Photoshop CS3

I haven’t posted anything recently but I have been playing around more with my photos in Photoshop CS3.  I edit the better photos that I take with Photoshop CS3 to put back the red that is lost when diving.  Up until now I’ve had a variety of results – you can see the latest Gozo photos below.  I’ve now come across a action for Photoshop CS3 which has produced very different results, so I decided to post a comparison.

Here is the original, straight from my camera without any edits:

Here is the same photo edit the way I have always done it, by applying filters in Photoshop.  The colours are better, but still not quite there.

Here is the edit using the new ‘Underwater’ action I have discovered for Photoshop:

There is a great improvement in the colours using the Underwater action.  Not only are there improvments in terms of colour but also filesize (something to consider when posting images on the web), it’s almost 50% smaller. The fullsize original, pre-edit was 3.33MB, post-edit 1.47MB.

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