Photoshopping Corals 201

So lets continue our quest to show you how not to present your corals to your audience. Last time, we looked at many ways you can Photoshop (a verb used to mean edit) your corals. Today I am going to look at color saturation.

Lets take this photo of Acropora tenuis and work with it for this exercise:

The picture above is a clean transfer into Photoshop. Unedited. Our first need is to white balance the picture, so lets do that.

I like to keep my backgrounds as blurred and dark as I possibly can. This way the coral can be isolated from any background clutter that you may capture by accident. It also allows the coral to ‘pop’ out of the picture. In PhotoShop, this function will be found under Levels. Do a manual adjustment of your white and black end-markers first. Then adjust your mid-levels accordingly. Just remember, try to remove the background without too much black/white saturation.

Here is what you don’t want it to look like..

Next step should be color balancing. The preferred method of balancing would be using a manual adjustment. In my opinion, if you manually color balance, you can and will get an accurate look of your coral. As you visualize how your coral looks like under normal (10K) lights, you can move the slider for blue, green and red. Sometimes you might need to adjust a lot of blue or green. Other times you just need a touch of all three. Here is what I did:

If you are using 20K lights, you need to wait for ‘Photoshopping Your Corals 301′. In most cases, people use 14K to 10K bulbs allowing them to adjust their colors much easily than those who have 20K bulbs.

Here are a couple of example of over-saturating your image. First, the coral in overdone blue (20K-like) light. This was done by moving the blue adjustment to the maximum position.

Yes, the coral can look better this way, but, it is not a true representation of its beauty. Its like going into a night club, meeting a hot chick, only to find out next day (in your bed) that she has been hit with a rented shovel a couple more times than necessary. Lighting can do that to a person, or in this case, a coral. Lets see if I tried to adjust the green hue (as it is present in the coral):

This clearly washes out the blue that is found in the coral. So lets not go there. We have to bring it back more. Color adjustments should be made only when the true representations of your coral’s colors are not present. For my case, the photograph was adjusted slightly towards the blue, as the blue was being muted by the green and white.

Next up, sharpening!Duh? Every image needs a little bit of sharpening. In Photoshop, the tool is called Unsharp Mask. Every photo is different, so your settings in unsharp mask should reflect that. Play around with them and find the balance between detailing your edges and keeping their focus. Here is what my looked like after the adjustment:

That is it. Once you sharpen the image, the image as a whole is complete. Just remember, White Balance, Color Adjustment, and Sharpen.

Let see my finished product, using the two before and after PS photos:

Now go and have fun with your pictures. Class is dismissed!