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How to Get Correct Skin Tones In Your Underwater PhotosBut putting divers in your underwater photos carries a multitude of challenges. First you have to have a cooperative model. That model has to understand at least the basics of taking direction and posing underwater. Lighting angles are critical to properly illuminate the face and eyes.
Even with all these things in place, many underwater photographers miss the mark on a critical point in photographing divers underwater — skin tones.
Proper exposure will mean nothing if your diver’s face has a sickly blue cast and that unfortunately, happens all too often. Water acts as a powerful light filter. Only a few feet reduces reds and yellows, crucial colors for proper skin tones.
There are a number of different ways to reduce or solve this problem. First, you must use adequate supplemental lighting, usually in the form of strobes. Ambient light photography of people underwater should be limited to very shallow waters or silhouette. Most strobes will emulate ordinary sunlight or “natural” light as much as possible. Some strobes, however, are slightly “warmer.” One of many technical specifications of a strobe is its “color temperature.” If you will be doing a lot of diver photography, a warmer strobe will give you a bit of an edge.
Second, get as close to your subject as possible. The less water between your strobe and subject, the less the filtering effect. Too much water between the diver’s face and the strobe is the single largest contributor to the “blue face” effect. Keep your distance from strobe to subject within eight feet, preferably less than five. And the best way to do this is with an excellent wide angle lenses—20mm or less. With the wide angle, you will be able to get very close, yet still capture most of the scene. As you get close, however, be careful to not overexpose your diver’s faces!
Although it should not be your primary consideration, your choice of film (if you are shooting film) can have an effect on the appearance of skin tones in your underwater photos. Kodachrome®, Fuji Velvia®, Kodak Ektachrome® VS and an other “color saturated” films have a somewhat warmer color temperature and can help in diver photos.
And finally, you could use filters, something I do not recommend. Filters overcompensate and are not selective in what they correct, covering the entire scene of the photo. Blue water can turn purple and marine plants and animals lose their natural colors.
Digital photography and digital manipulation have opened a whole new avenue of solving the problem bluish skin tones. Don’t try warming up the photo from inside the camera by adjusting the white balance. Leave that on auto. Manipulating it manually will have the same effect as using a warming filter, casting odd colors on other elements of the photo such as the water and reef.
Where you can let the digital age help you is in Adobe Photoshop® or similar photo manipulation program. Convert the image to CYMK (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, blacK). Use the lasso tool with a 1 pixel feather and select all flesh-tone areas. Go to your color curves pallet and adjust so that in the average sampling of the area to be adjusted so Cyan is no more than 1/3 of Magenta and Yellow. The Yellow setting should be slightly lower than the Magenta. Do not overcompensate. It is better to leave the area a bit too cool (Cyan) than to make it too warm (Magenta and Yellow) as this will make the photo appear cartoonish and fake. You will need to custom manipulate settings according to the diver’s race and individual skin tone. Play with the settings and observe the results. This technique works equally well on scanned and digital original photos.
Dale Sheckler is Editor and Publisher of California Diving News and co-author of the book A Diver's Guide to Southern California's Best Beach Dives, 3rd Edition.
