Enhancing Underwater Photos with Photoshop

Learn how to make your underwater photographs sharper, more colorful, and more compelling with the photo editing and enhancement tools in Photoshop.

Getting a great underwater shot isn't easy. The dives are short, the fish move fast, and colors are filtered away by the water between your lens and the subject. You can bring back the full glory of sea life, though, by using the tools in Photoshop. In this course, expert Deke McClelland takes pictures from a recent dive in Honduras—where he captured jellyfish, angelfish, parrotfish, sea turtles, octopi, moray eels, fire worms, and even a passing reef shark—and makes the images even more incredible with Photoshop's photo editing and enhancement tools. Learn how to correct contrast, enhance color, sharpen moving targets, correct distortion, and develop black-and-white versions of your images, as well as movies and animated GIFs. It's an ocean of creative possibilities—as only Photoshop can offer. Watch and learn how to take your underwater photography to even greater depths.

Introduction

• Photoshop, the star of the undersea world
• Gear that I used: The SeaLife DC1400 and the GoPro HERO4 Black

1. Something Basic: The Moon Jelly

• Selecting a frame from a GoPro movie
• Correcting contrast with the Overlay blend mode
• Turning the ocean a true Caribbean blue
• Enhancing clarity with the High Pass filter
• Cropping an image that can't be harmed

2. A Fish Worth Remembering: The Angelfish

• Selecting the best frame of a fish in motion
• Permanently (and fearlessly) upsampling an image
• Bringing out color and beauty in Camera Raw
• Sharpening a moving target with Shake Reduction
• Smoothing edges on a channel-by-channel basis

3. Something More Colorful: The Parrotfish

• Parrotfish: The colorful keepers of the coral
• The quick-and-dirty fix: Auto Levels and Vibrance
• Recording the Auto Levels trick as an action
• Correcting GoPro lens distortion in Camera Raw
• Reining in (and rebuilding) hot highlights
• Enhancing the fish's dramatic eye

4. Large and in Charge: The Grouper

• The fish to end all fish
• Correcting color, tone, and distortion
• Cropping in Photoshop, not Camera Raw
• Selecting and enhancing a smooth detail
• Painting away an unwanted diver
• Opening and cropping a movie in Photoshop
• Animating the position of a cropped movie
• Rendering the first edit of your movie
• Enhancing a movie with the Camera Raw filter

5. Everyone's Favorite: The Sea Turtle

• The most magical reptile of all
• Developing a turtle in flight
• Correcting color balance on a color-by-color basis
• Bringing out the detail in a turtle's eye
• Working from the last-applied settings
• Developing a black-and-white turtle
• The best way to sepia-tone a photograph
• Healing away unwanted elements
• Content-aware smoothing with Color Adaptation

6. The Nightlife: The Octopus and Other Invertebrates

• Night of the invertebrates
• Developing multiple octopuses at a time
• Combining High Pass with Linear Light
• Merging two photos into one Facebook-friendly image
• Adding black borders and white margins

7. Watch Your Fingers: Moray and Other Eels

• Don't play with the eels!
• First, we develop a still frame
• Editing a seamlessly looping, six-second movie
• Color balancing and sharpening the movie
• Exporting a seamlessly looping animated GIF
• Preparing a movie to post on Vine

8. Swimming with Sharks

• How a shark-dive works
• Developing a once-in-a-lifetime shark photo
• Cropping, straightening, and centering the shark
• Rebuilding missing details with Content-Aware
• Zooming in and out of a movie in post
• Panning and pivoting with Transform keyframes
• Sweetening the shark movie in Camera Raw
• Adding a soundtrack and a fade to black
• Adding titles to your movie
• Animating a title and speeding up the render

9. A Last Lucky Rarity: The Bearded Fireworm

• Zooming and framing a macro shot
• Adjusting levels one channel at a time
• Smoothing an oversharp image with High Pass
• Simulating depth of field with Gaussian Blur

Conclusion

• Four tips for underwater photography