We just got home from our holiday in Curaçao, and one thing we love to do there is snorkelling. Both my man and I carry a camera under water, and we love to take photos of all the amazing stuff you see down there. But most of the time the photos need some, or a lot of work. Since I have now edited hundreds of photos taken under water, I thought I’d share what I have learned about post processing.

Just to start with an example: Below is a before and after. This image was taken with the compact Leica C inside a DiCaPac sac. It was set on ‘auto’, this camera doesn’t have an underwater preset. As you can see the image is quite green. You might think that there is not much you can do to recover the colors. However, as you can see in the image below, after some processing it looks pretty neat!

It takes four steps to create this image. The first thing to do is to change the white balance to remove the green color-cast. First move the Tint-slider to the purple side, I used values between +50 and +100. After adding purple, the white balance is fine-tuned with the Temp-slider (I used values between -10 and +20)

In the next step a lot of magic happens with the ‘dehaze’ slider. This feature was only added to Lightroom recently, and usually I use it with great caution. In normal (landscape) photos it can help to remove some haze, but it can quickly look unnatural. However, under water where there is a lot of haze due to light-reflecting particles in the water, it is a great tool. This is what happens to this image when dehaze is applied:

The photo already looks a lot better now, and colors are appearing. You can see in the histogram that the dehaze function has increased the contrast. That is why I apply contrast after I apply dehaze. So the example image is further enhanced by adding contrast, both with the contrast slider, as with the tone-sliders (and a little exposure correction might be required):

For the final image (above) vibrance and saturation was added. Again, for normal landscape photography I am always very cautious with adding saturation, but for underwater photos it really helps!

Two more photos from the Leica C, processed in a similar way:

Most of our underwater photos were taken by my man, who used a Canon Powershot G7x inside a dedicated underwater housing:

This combination generates better photos than the Leica C in what is basically a plastic bag. However, the photos could still use some post processing. Although the G7x has an underwater preset, a few photos were shot in raw, and one of them is shown here as an editing example. Original shot:

The same four steps were applied: white balance, dehaze, contrast, saturation:

And again, for the final image some vibrance was added. This is the final result:

When the underwater preset is used the white balance and contrast is already better, but I applied the same four steps to those files as well. Here are my favourite images from the Powershot, shot by my man (but edited by me 🙂 ):

Hope you enjoyed the colourful fish. Thanks for reading!