Photo Editing For Reefing Glory - How To

Wrangy

Acropora Nut
RS STAFF
PREMIUM
Alrighty so a few peeps on this lovely forum have some questions and problems with taking blue light shots (this will also greatly help with regular lighting shots too!!). This is largely stolen from a post that @Biggles made so credit goes to him, I'm just changing things up for a post here :)

There's a freeware app called "Paint.net" which has many of the features photoshop has but is much more beginner friendly and a little more straight forward to use, heck even I find it easy as the process is literally 4 steps! I don't use any photoshop post-production for my pictures and pretty much solely process them through paint.net to get the shots you see in my thread :)
The first step to this procedure is to find a photo you want to touch up! My example is one of my old zoa garden under daylights:


Next step is to open up paint.net for yourself and add the photo, I right-click on my photo and open with paint.net:


After that it's all about the adjustments tab! The whole process is based around the options in this tab:


Now the first step is to hit that lovely Auto-Level option and let the software adjust the levels a little, don't worry if it looks crap though:


Now that the photo has been levelled, it's time to bring it back a little bit to looking good again, this is done with the levels option. You'll be moving the middle slider of the right side:


As you can see now that the levels have been adjusted, the middle slider having been brought down to change the face brightness of the image:


The next step is to tweak the brightness and contrast, I like to turn the face brightness down a little so I bump the brightness up but if you don't push that level so far you can bring it down or how you like to taste. I always bring the contrast down 5-points as it gives a good result!


The final step is to bring the hue of the image down 5-points and the lightness down 5 as well, it gives a nice tone to the image, now the saturation is something that is completely up to personal preference! You'll get a better balanced and truer image if you turn it down a little but I like a little bit of saturation so I bump it up a little, especially if I'm using zoa's ;)


So from all of that you end up with an image that goes from this:


Too looking like this :)


A pretty decent outcome given it was taken completely under the lovely daylights of the tank!
Another good example is using @Pat24601 recent FTS ;) It's not a huge difference but it does bring a little bit of that pop back into some of the corals :)
Before:


After:



Given how much I love my zoa's and how amazing they look under those lovely blue led's, I always want to get the good pics of them at their best. I use a proper low-end DSLR camera with the standard lens, setting it to AV (aperture priority mode) and always use a custom white balance to find the right level for the photo. If you can get the shot with your phone or digital camera without that heavy blue noise (turn the blues down a touch and the whites up a little) this will allow you to get a close to blue photo to then edit into glory!
This is how a zoa pic usually starts:


And after a little magic, you can understand why I adore my zoa's!



Now that you've all had the chance to be given a run through of a little bit of software magic I expect to be seeing some amazing shots from EVERYONE now!! haha I really implore everyone to give it a red hot go and post some of their own before and after shots in this thread so that we can get the ball rolling and get everyone taking some really nice high-class photos :)
 

newo11

Well-Known Member
Excellent info! I haven't invested in Photoshop yet (neither the money or the time to learn it) so this is an interesting option. Do you shoot in RAW or are you processing standard jpegs?

Thanks for the post!
 

Wrangy

Acropora Nut
RS STAFF
PREMIUM
Excellent info! I haven't invested in Photoshop yet (neither the money or the time to learn it) so this is an interesting option. Do you shoot in RAW or are you processing standard jpegs?

Thanks for the post!
I don't think I'll be getting photoshop because of this little program :) not until my camera equipment gets better haha
I just shot in high quality jpeg, I haven't tried raw with this program so I don't know if it'll accept it or not
 

Pat24601

Well-Known Member
Thanks for this detailed post! I'm going to download and try it out when I get a sec. Maybe in time for FTF? We will find out. :)
 

Wrangy

Acropora Nut
RS STAFF
PREMIUM
Love your work everyone!! I'm really really pleased to see that the thread and tutorial has made a difference for everyone :) Looking forward to seeing what everyone will now bring to the table with their photo's!! This weekend is a good chance to take a few ;)

This is another great thread about how to take good photo's by @nivek
http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forum/index.php?threads/photography-101-marine-tank-version.87150/

I can write up a little bit about how I take my photo's though if anyone wants?
 

newo11

Well-Known Member
Love your work everyone!! I'm really really pleased to see that the thread and tutorial has made a difference for everyone :) Looking forward to seeing what everyone will now bring to the table with their photo's!! This weekend is a good chance to take a few ;)

This is another great thread about how to take good photo's by @nivek
http://www.reefsanctuary.com/forum/index.php?threads/photography-101-marine-tank-version.87150/

I can write up a little bit about how I take my photo's though if anyone wants?

Please do!
 

Oxylebius

Well-Known Member
I bet this can work just as well on underwater scuba pics, I've got some of them that are really blue or green in color.

Here are a sampling of scuba pics that I had tried to edit already, using microsoft office picture manager. As you can see w/the edits I did do, it still has the green or blue tint to the pics.











 

sirrealism

Well-Known Member
Having to download and install windows service pack 1 for windows 7 before the program will work. Guess I needed it anyway. I will post some pics retouched once its all installed.
Thanks Wrangly
 
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