Enhancing Underwater Photos with Photoshop

Course details

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.

Learning objectives
Selecting the best frame of a fish in motion
Correcting contrast
Enhancing clarity
Bringing out color and beauty in Camera Raw
Sharpening a moving target with Shake Reduction
Correcting lens distortion
Developing black-and-white versions of underwater photos
Creating a looping movie or animated GIF
Framing macro shots
Simulating depth of field with Gaussian Blur

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Photoshop, the star of the undersea world
02 - Gear that I used - The SeaLife DC1400 and the GoPro HERO4 Black

1. Something Basic - The Moon Jelly

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

2. A Fish Worth Remembering - The Angelfish

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

3. Something More Colorful - The Parrotfish

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

4. Large and in Charge - The Grouper

19 - The fish to end all fish
20 - Correcting color, tone, and distortion
21 - Cropping in Photoshop, not Camera Raw
22 - Selecting and enhancing a smooth detail
23 - Painting away an unwanted diver
24 - Opening and cropping a movie in Photoshop
25 - Animating the position of a cropped movie
26 - Rendering the first edit of your movie
27 - Enhancing a movie with the Camera Raw filter

5. Everyone's Favorite - The Sea Turtle

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

6. The Nightlife - The Octopus and Other Invertebrates

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

7. Watch Your Fingers - Moray and Other Eels

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

8. Swimming with Sharks

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

9. A Last Lucky Rarity - The Bearded Fireworm

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

Conclusion

62 - Four tips for underwater photography