[Shadowkiller]

Editing... the bit I hate.

When I got back from Vanuatu I had over 900 photos to go through. One by #$%^* one...

My editing technique:

1. Check the pic, is it of a fish tail, random geography where a fish used to be a second before or just rubbish? Delete.

2. Check for brightness and focus. A very dark pic is hard to save, as is a really blurry one. Delete.

3. By now youre down to roughly 20-40% of your original pics. Have multiple photos of the same fish? Don't just keep one! For identification of the species, a shot of the tail fin may be more useful than a head-on shot.

4. Open the file in a photo editor like Adobe Photoshop. Crop according to taste. The positioning of the fish, ie the composition is a matter of personal taste, so experiment!

5. Eliminate major backscatter using the heal or rubberstamp tool. This makes the pic look less like a snowstorm photo, and more like it was 30m viz.

6. Colour correction. This can be done poorly, using only the "auto-correction". If the pic has a lot of blue/green background, it can look horrendous. For the lazy, its the easiest option. Once you know what you want, manually adjusting the levels is best. There are usually 3 channels, red, green and blue; which can be manipulated to add/subtract each colour from the pic.

7. Sharpening: I use the "Unsharp mask" to sharpen photos to better define eyes and scales. Again, you get better with practice. Oversharpening looks rubbish, so its not hard to work out when to stop.

8. Save the file as large as possible, then save a smaller version for internet use. Dont post 1meg files! Dial-up users will hate you.

The below pic is an example of selective editing. Whilst the composition of the original was just ok, with sloping pylons and a school of fish in the background, it was dark, and due to the filthy water, had lots of backscatter. The subject, a Clown toby, was also too small, and was swamped by the rest of the pic. It didnt draw the viewers eye to it as much as it should.

So I decided to crop it tightly, and make a "Fish ID photo" type of photo out if it.

The following steps were taken:
1. Cropping, with the centre point of the pic being the centre of the fish.
This removed the pylons, and other background, leaving the fish as the only item of interest in the pic.
2. Colour correction using the "Auto Levels" function in Photoshop.
I checked the natural colours of the fish in books and on the Fishbase database to make sure I got it right.
3. Brightness enhancement.
The pic looked better brighter. No other reason.