Photo Restoration – Tackling Underwater Images
You arrived back from the scuba diving holiday of a lifetime and … oh your photos are not what you thought, blue wishy-washy, lacking in punch and clarity. Sadly this is a property of water, it has the unfortunate ability to filter out the red spectrum of light and thus the further down you go the stronger the effect until eventually there is no red left in the available light. Your pictures will no doubt be a beautiful blue by now.
Correcting this effect is not as simple as it sounds. There is a great deal of tweaking to be done. As your reds have completed disappeared it will be a good idea to check the channels of your image. Take a look at the red, it’s all but disappeared, it will probably be almost completely black and devoid of detail. Here it gets tricky, or at least finding the right combination of actions to take, requires some experience.
Basically, the red channel is useless and needs to be recreated from scratch. We can borrow information from the green and blue channels to build one. Once this is done the reconstruction can begin. Sadly at this stage, I cannot give a clear and concise procedural walkthrough, as each image has to be treated differently. I did try and produce an action for this but alas whilst working well for some images it ruined others and have therefore concluded it way more involved than my simplistic explanation.
I have seen this technique put to very good use and I will be back with the ins and outs once my schedule allows me to bring to you the mysteries of photo restoration and the science that fixes those underwater blues.
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