Now that you’ve taken thousands of underwater images, what do you do with all of them? Photo editing software, such as Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, are excellent tools to catalogue and organize your images, and edit your images to take them from so-so to show-worthy! We still advocate trying to improve your photographic chops by shooting it right in the camera, but learning these tools can overcome many user errors, taking an image once destined for the trash can to something shareable with family and friends.
GoAskErin’s Erin Quigley is a certified teaching professional for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, and an award-winning underwater photographer. She has developed specific workflows for the underwater photographer to tackle the most common problems we encounter in our images. Send your question and your problematic underwater image to GoAskErin; she just might use it for her next tutorial!
The main problem with this otherwise lovely shot of a manta is bad White Balance. One click of the white balance eye dropper in either Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw will work a world of wonders, and there are a few more tools to help finesse it. Once I fix the white balance, however, it’s clear that I need something better than the kludgy Lightroom Spot Removal tool to clean up the backscatter, so I’ll take the image into Photoshop to finish it. If you only have Lightroom, you can take a stab at removing backscatter there, but you’ll want to open a vein if you have more than just a few spots to remove. If you don’t feel like opening a vein, might I suggest opening a bottle of your favorite adult beverage and settling in for a long, tedious spot fest.
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