This weekend I am participating in the Orlando PurpleStride 5k event at Blanchard Park in Orlando, FL. Not only will I be running to raise research funds for Pancreatic Cancer for PanCan, but I have also created a custom painting for the event’s raffle. Stop by to see it in person at 8am and stick around for the race and other prizes.

I am really enjoying working with Adobe Lightroom. The small amount of editing tools compared to Photoshop are just right when it comes to streamlining your digital photography work flow. For example, I was able to modify several ‘throw away’ pictures I had in my archives and create something a little more artistic. These images were not framed properly, under or over exposed, had large amounts of back scatter or just simply didn’t stand out. After tinkering with them I came up with a fish portrait set.

Over the past week I made time to edit some of my underwater photos. With the limited visibility and my suborn attitude (I wanted to shoot all wide-angle with my new lens) the photos were less than stellar right off of the memory card. Using Adobe Lightroom, I was able to rescue a number of images. Check them out below.

In a previous post I shared a video of an aggressive Green Moray eel while diving in Islamorada. The more I looked at the video, the more I felt that the color was way too heavy in the blue spectrum. Using Adobe Premiere I decided to work a little on the color correction.

Why color correction?

Color correction is needed since the first color to leave the spectrum while diving is red. This lack of red causes most photos and videos to appear washed out and very blue. The only ways to counteract this is with either underwater lighting, color correcting lenses or software color correction.

Adobe Premiere and the Channel Mixer.

By far one of the easiest ways to bring back the red is to mix channels in Adobe Premiere. Premiere has built in filters that allow you to tinker with your color output. In this video, I dialed in the following in the Channel Mixer. If a channel isn’t listed below, it is safe to assume it was left at 0.

Red-Red: 100
Red-Blue: 75
Green-Green: 100
Blue-Blue 95

I also decreased the brightness to -22 and increased the contrast to 2.8.
While these settings worked for my video, you may have to play with your settings to get the exact result you are looking for. Enjoy!
Before

After