The finished image

I recently posted some images from Tankspace. Sometimes, when I'm bored I tend to have a play around in Photoshop and Lightroom. This shot features Lisa from my first visit to Tankspace It was made up out of three images and an awful lot of layers in photoshop.

The original raw import

The image above is the straight out of camera image, absolutely nothing done with it. In Lightroom I upped the exposure, boosted (slightly) the saturation and upped the vibrance. I then used the selection tool to select Lisa (the model) and increased the exposure slightly and upped the brightness on just that part of the image. I had to reduce the highlights a little as it almost blew her face out. After that I exported into Photoshop. At this point its still obvious that the image was taken in a water tank.

Snorkelling in the red sea

This was taken using my GoPro when I wasa snorkelling in Egypt a few years back. I thought this would work, the light was more or less coming from the same direction so it would be relatively easy to combine the two images.

Almost finished

I deleted the swimmers from the previous image and added a few more fish from another shot (most of which I didn't like so got rid of them in the final image). Finally I sorted out the sea bed and then added a new layer filled with dark blue and then changed the blending mode. And that is it. A finished image that I hope looks reasonably realistic, and adds something to the original. This is a condensed version of my workflow,

I realise that some purists don't like this approach, and a photo should be exactly that, an image taken straight out of the camera. Each to their own (and I'm not going to get into the whole debate about editing photos). There's room for both approaches in my opinion.

---

About me:

I can mostly be found shooting models, aviation, motorsports and, when I can, wildlife. But I enjoy most aspects of photography.