Photoshop

[Badfish83]

Photography beginner here. Is full photoshop necessary, or can I just get Lightroom? Since I'm mainly just wanting to adjust white balance, does Lightroom do a good job of this?

 

[redfishbluefish]

I'm assuming you're using a point-n-shoot or a phone to take pictures...and neither one is capable of white balancing. Your next easy and inexpensive choice is to use gels. A set of three or four reddish colored gels should "correct" color balance with no post picture correction needed. HERE is a rather poor video that shows how a gel corrects for the blue color. This person doesn't speak so you don't know what gel he is using, but it still isn't the best choice of a gel. However, it will give you the idea. Should be able to pick up a couple small gels for under 5 bucks. You simply place the gel in front of the camera lens and take the picture.

 

[Badfish83]

That is a neat little trick. I'll have to try that. I have a nikon d3100 though.

 

[redfishbluefish]

You can set white balance on that camera. Try manual setting, and I think the highest you can go on that Nikon is 10000K. Try that and see what you get.

 

[joshporksandwich]

Lightroom is all I use. On the d3100 set the white balance to flash.

 

[Badfish83]

Thanks guys, I will try those settings. I downloaded the free trial of Lightroom and I definitely like it

 

[revhtree Verified Admin]

You can also learn a free program called GIMP that does a lot of what PS does.

 

[zibba]

I rarely use photoshop anymore because the newest version of lightroom is pretty solid. Unless you're doing something really demanding, lightroom should be entirely sufficient for reef photography. I recently started using adobe creative cloud, which gives you the latest and greatest lightroom and photoshop for $10/mo. Decent deal and they offer a trial version.

 

[Badfish83]

I'll look into that rev, I love free. Lightroom seems really good though. I'm pretty happy with how some of my pictures ended up.