Emperor Divers' Red Sea Forum

Underwater pictures tend to be (very) blue, quite a disappointment for divers surfacing after witnessing the entire rainbow of colors while they were under water.

This is due to the eye beeing a little to "verastile". When you are down there, the brain thinks "Whow, that was a lot of blue, I'll need to filter it most away, and take more into consideration the other colors". Therefore your diveslate that was white at the surface will still look white at 20 meters - for your eye.

Now if you take a picture of the same diveslate at 20 meters, the picture will (after returning to the surface) look very blue, because the camera is not as versatile as the combination of your brain and your eyes.

With traditional film, you must either bring your own light down there (divelight or flash), or use an orange filter that will filter away most of the excess blue. Whith a digital camera, the story is entirely different.

If you have a camera that takes pictures in the .RAW format, that is close to perfect. This format is just a collection of pixel values without any reference to what is which color. Your computer can set any picture point to white - and distribute the other colors accordingly.

The only problem is that if you have to "shift" the color scale by much, you must compensate this by overexposing your pictures slightly, about 1 f-stop per 15 meters to "compensate for all the blue that goes away".

Lacking a camera with the .RAW format setting, you can still on most digital cameras set the white balance manully. Just bring your white diveslate down to the depth you want to operate on, point the camera at it from roughly the same distance as you want to take your pictures from (within + - 5 meters), press the "set white balance" button, and happy shooting. Minor imperfections in color balance can easily be adjusted later.

If you look at the pictures on the camera LCD while you are "down there", they will look all red and poor (because your eyes still compensate for the excess blue light), but back at the surface they will look great in terms of color. So all you need to think of is composition and to keep your camera steady. In the Red Sea you can leave your flash at the surface for dives down to 30 meters.

Some cameras (like the Canon Powershot A95 that I am using) have an "underwater" setting. It is OK, but not perfect, but if you do a mix of flash photography and natural light, it will switch the color balance by itself to match the flash light when the flash fires and then switch back automatically when the flash is not active. That saves a lot of white balance adjustment, because otherwise the flash images will look all red when color balance is correct according to underwater depth. The imperfectness of the "Underwater" setting can easily be compensated with an image editing program like Photoshop.

Digital cameras allow dynamic white balance, and are therefore in mots aspects superior for underwater photography. The new high-resolution digital cameras take pictures that will in most aspects be better than pictures on film, and even with proper underwater housing they are reasonably priced.

Get down there and shoot - pictures. Leave only bubbles.

Hi Stein,

Thanks for your post, it certainly sounds like you know your photography. I am sure this information will be as helpful to lots of people as it was to me (a total novice,) and lets wish them all better colour pictures.

Thanks again
Rose

Just a few examples of pictures that would otherwise appear very blue:

http://sudan-scuba.com/zoom/Itemid,34/page,view/catid,1/PageNo,16/key,139/hit,1/

http://sudan-scuba.com/zoom/Itemid,34/page,view/catid,1/PageNo,2/key,9/hit,1/

http://sudan-scuba.com/zoom/Itemid,34/page,view/catid,1/PageNo,3/key,24/hit,1/