Robert Herb Photography Blog

The final step in the underwater Lightroom workflow is exporting the finished image with the right settings for its purpose, whether it will be used on a blog, social media, portfolio, or print. How to choose the right Lightroom export settings for blogs, social media, portfolios, and print Exporting underwater photos from Lightroom is the final step that protects the quality of your finished edit. If you choose the wrong file format, color space, image size, sharpening, or quality setting, a strong underwater photo can look soft, flat, over-compressed, or strangely colored once it leaves Lightroom. If you have followed this From Dull to WOW case-study series from the beginning, you have seen how much difference a clear Lightroom workflow can make. We started with an underwater photo that looked flat, dull, and far removed from what we experienced on the dive. Step by step, we worked through the process: White Balance → Exposure → Presence → Color → Masking → Final Cleanup → E...

Final cleanup is the step that turns a good underwater edit into a finished photograph by removing distractions, protecting the subject, cleaning the edges, and keeping the image natural. How to polish an underwater photo in Lightroom without making it look fake If you have been following this From Dull to WOW series, we have already worked through some of the biggest problems underwater photographers face in Lightroom. We have looked at color recovery. We have looked at white balance. We have looked at exposure. We have examined how to restore detail, depth, and dimension in a flat underwater scene. In From Dull to WOW #5 , we focused on rebuilding a flat underwater photo by restoring tonal depth, Presence, color, subject separation, masking, and final adjustments. That post also introduced the idea that even after the image looks much better, there may still be small distractions pulling the viewer’s eye away from the subject. That is where this next step begins. Because sometimes t...