Mike's Vacation Photo

[ggroess]

Mike is off Diving the Plancar Reef off Cozumel He sent this challenge along for you to work on...

Greg

[ggroess]

Ok...
There are things you can do to improve this treasure...
I'll throw one out here and see if there are any sharks in the water.....
Greg

[mikemeister_admin]

Such a nice picture. Could not find a grey an no sharp:( 
But did som basic adjustments in Lab mode and some unsharp mask.
Regards
ThomasD

[leeharper_admin]

Well - mine is by no means perfect, but I'll throw it out there to see what you make of it...

Firstly, in PS I duplicated the background layer, set the new layer to the Screen blending mode to brighten the picture up (about 4 times to get it sufficiently light).

Then into CurveMeister. My plan was to use the Lab B channel to reduce the saturation of the blue areas, and make the sand yellow (I did this by moving the Blue endpoint downwards; I had hue clocks set on the underside of the fish, and the sand - I figured that light part of the fish should be slightly positive in the B channel).

I thought that I wouldn't need to make any other moves (before trying...), but I had to rotate the A curve until it was pretty much horizontal to fix the colour up (didn't see that coming)...

Whilst I was in Lab, I thought that I should curve the L channel as well; I used the threshold feature to set a shadow point, and then added a slight s-curve.

Finally, I returned to PS and added a bit of Hiraloam sharpening.

It's not great, but it's better than the original; any suggestions gratefully received...

Nice challenge!
Lee.

[imported_ganna]

I was just playing around. I'm not sure what the colours look down there; after all the rain we're having in South Africa the coast is rather brown than blue :)  Here's my effort.

[mikemeister_admin]

I have no idea what I did.  I just kept trying different things till I got this.

[mikemeister_admin]

Used RGB and a hi def sharpening.GregM

[mikemeister_admin]

I'm curious - nobody seems to be addressing the blue cast in the image; surely once your eyes have adapted to the conditions under the water, you (by which I mean Mike ;)) would perceive the sand as approximately yellow - no?

Perhaps Mike could let us know (I've never been on a dive - I've been in them, but...)

Blue sand just seems a bit odd to me...

Lee.

P.S., not picking on anybody - just curious...

[mikemeister_admin]

I liked the color of the Ray that you and Art got,but it seemed to come at the expense of detail to the sea floor and saturation to the rock outcropping.I think the problems come from the light source.GJM