Robert Herb Photography Blog

Wide-angle and macro underwater photos require different Lightroom editing approaches to achieve natural, professional results Understanding how editing differs between wide-angle and macro underwater photography is key to achieving consistent, professional results. One of the most common mistakes underwater photographers make in Lightroom is applying the same editing approach to every image. It usually happens after a dive trip. You import a full card of images, apply your familiar workflow, adjust exposure, warm the white balance, add contrast, boost color, sharpen, and move on. That approach can improve an image. But when applied to everything, it often works against you. A wide-angle reef scene and a macro portrait of a nudibranch may have been captured on the same dive, with the same camera, only minutes apart. But they are not asking for the same edit. Wide-angle images are about environment, depth, and storytelling. Macro images are about precision, detail, and subject isolation...

A real-world underwater edit transformation, showing how a flat blue RAW file can become a vibrant, balanced image using a step-by-step Lightroom Classic workflow. 📘  Start here:   The Complete Guide to Editing Underwater Photos in Lightroom 👉 https://robertherb.blogspot.com/2026/03/editing-underwater-photos-lightroom-guide.html A complete start-to-finish case study using the Back-to-Basics workflow Introduction: Why Your Underwater Photos Don’t Match What You Saw If you’ve ever surfaced from an incredible dive, loaded your images into Lightroom, and thought: “That’s not what it looked like underwater…” You’re not alone. What you experienced was vibrant, full of color, depth, and life. What your camera captured was flat, blue, and lacking impact. That gap is exactly why post-processing matters. In this post, I’m going to walk you through a real underwater image edit from start to finish , using the exact workflow I’ve been teaching throughout the Back-to-Basics series. This ...