Some say color correction for underwater photos is the utmost difficult. We'll show how they're wrong with this color correction Photoshop technique so easy, even a color blind person can do it! This technique can also be used for other types of photo such as outdoor landscape.

Remove Blue Color Cast From Underwater Photos Photoshop Tutorial

First, open an underwater photo into Photoshop. If your digital image collection is anything like mine, then you'll probably have trouble finding an underwater photo. You can download many free underwater stock photos from sxc.hu. When picking which underwater image to use, pick an image that isn't already color corrected. Sometimes the images may have a low color range that cannot be restored. Look for color images instead of monochromatic images with a harsh blue or teal tint.

The aquarium image I used below came from a commercial stock photo website.

As with any retouching Photoshop techniques, we need to analyze the problem before we can create the cure. With any color correction, the first area to look at is the Channels palette. The Channels palette shows the balance between the colors. As you can see from the Channels palette below, the reds are way too dark and the blue is slightly too bright. To fix this, we'll need to brighten the reds and darken the blues. Now I have the solution to my aquarium photo and I can begin retouching it.

One of the best tool to fix color correction problem is the Levels tool. You may use the Levels tool frequently to fix brightness and contrast, but it also works great with color correction. In fact, it's easier and more accurate than any Photoshop tool to for white balance correction.

Color Correction with Levels

In the Layers palette, click on the new adjustment layer button and choose Levels.

While we're here,let me introduce you how to fix the white balance of normal photos in a single click. Below the option button in the levels tool are three eye droppers. Click on the middle eye dropper and click on a neutral gray area in the image. This works just like the white balance tool with RAW editors.

But with underwater images such as the aquarium image I downloaded, it's really difficult to find a neutral gray area. But because we looked in the channels and found the problem, we don't need to guess to know which colors to adjust - the reds and blues.

In the tutorial description, we said that even a color blind person can do this. How? We'll be watching the black and white data in the Channels as we make the adjustments. Even if you're color blind, you can still correct white balance using this technique.

Before we begin, have the Channels palette ready so that you can look at it while you make the adjustments. First, we'll fix the reds since it has the most influence on the final color output. In the levels tool, click on the drop down menu and select red. Adjust the middle input slider. As you move the slider, look at the photo and channel to see which setting to use. Because aquatic life is so colorful, we don't really know if it is exactly the right color so to help, look at the channels and make sure that the luminosity of the red channel is close to the green channel. When all three channels are the same luminosity, the white balance should look ok. When you're done, don't click OK yet! We still have to edit one more channel.

The photo is a lot better now but it's not perfect. The blue channel still seems a little too bright so now we'll edit the blue channel. Select Blue from the drop down menu and adjust the middle input slider the same way as the previous step. Click OK when you're done.

This step is totally optional - it is to improve the saturation. If your image already looks perfect, you're done. But if you feel that your image is lacking vibrancy, then follow the last two steps to find out how to add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to improve the color vividness.

In the Layers palette, click on the new adjustment layer button and choose Hue/Saturation.

Adjust the saturation setting. If you want to edit a specific color, click on the drop down menu and select the color. Click OK when done.

Final Results

Here's the before and after results of this underwater color correction Photoshop tutorial. Compare the amount of details that is visible in the color corrected version. The different species of algae are distinguishable and the sea anemone looks healthy.