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Here are photos from my dive trip to Church Rock at Catalina Island, 12-02. This was a great dive trip on the Mr. C for their annual Christmas Dive.

We dove the west side of Catalina which is really cool because usually we’re diving the East side. We dove Church Rock and then points in between Church Rock and Avalon. We moored in Avalon overnight and went ashore at night.

This was a tough batch of photos to work with. The weather this day was cloudy and almost raining. But we had great visibility this day. These shots were all taken before I adopted my strict “slightly underexposed” rule and made working them even tougher.

I’ve found when working with Photoshop, either with “normal” photography or with underwater, working an mildly overexposed photo is always much tougher than working a mildly underexposed photo. With that thought I eventually landed on a technique that allows the most usable photos underwater, and that is to always shoot just slightly underexposed, just slightly left of center of the light meter, dead center as second option, and never right of center if possible.

One simple levels layer in most cases was not enough, occasionally on these I’d throw a second levels and make a small targeted move, this helps a lot on though shots. Some were so dark, I’d use a cheater curve, a curves adjustment layer giving a good tug up on the tree-quarter tones. Then add a levels adjustment layer, making sure the levels was on top of the image and underneath the curve, and work my levels that way. After that I’d go back to the curves and readjust. I work back and forth that way in all cases. The more adjustment layers I add, the more I’ll re-visit and re-adjust previous layers. This gives better results than setting an adjustment and then forcing all following adjustments to work with the first. In this batch I was using curves first, just to allow me to see the changes being affected in levels, then I’d re-do, hide or eliminate the first curve, adding a second targeted levels or a different adjustment based on hints gained when working with my “cheater curve.”