How to restore colour in your underwater photos, step by step

Practical guide · Updated 27 July 2026 · Daniel Grau

Correcting an underwater photo is not moving sliders at random until it looks acceptable. There is a logical order, and following it saves you half the work and avoids the pink results that give away a bad correction.

Before you start: RAW or JPEG

If you can shoot RAW, do. The difference is not theoretical: RAW keeps 12 to 14 bits per channel against the 8 of a JPEG. In practice, in the nearly empty red channel of a photo taken at 20 metres, RAW still holds usable data where JPEG holds only noise.

If all you have is JPEG that is fine, it corrects perfectly well. Just be aware you will reach the limit sooner, so do not push.

The correct order of adjustments

Step 1. White balance

This solves roughly 70% of the problem. You are telling the software what should be neutral grey in the photo so it can rebalance every channel from there.

With the eyedropper, look for something that in reality was grey or white: sand, a pale rock, a buddy's tank, a regulator, a mask skirt. Avoid the background water, which is not neutral, and avoid anything with a colour of its own.

If there is no neutral point anywhere in the scene, use automatic correction and then refine by eye with temperature and tint.

Step 2. Exposure

Now that the colour is right, set the overall brightness. Do it after white balance, not before: changing the channel balance alters perceived luminosity and you would have to redo it.

Watch the sun. If you have beams or surface in frame, check that no area has gone completely white. Once a region hits pure white there is no information left to recover.

Step 3. Contrast and blacks

Underwater photos usually arrive flat and slightly veiled, because suspended particles scatter the light. Raising contrast and pulling the blacks down a little restores the sense of depth.

One detail that separates amateur from professional work: do not crush the blacks completely. Leaving them slightly lifted, short of zero, gives a more cinematic and less harsh finish.

Step 4. Saturation

This goes last, never first. If you saturate before correcting colour, what you amplify is the blue cast, which is the opposite of what you want.

If your software offers it, use vibrance rather than plain saturation: it affects muted colours more and already vivid ones less, so it is much harder to overdo.

Step 5. Sharpening, only where it belongs

Sharpen the subject, not the water. Sharpening the blue background only makes noise and suspended particles visible, which is exactly what you do not want on show.

The four mistakes that ruin a correction

The shortcut: automatic correction

Everything above can be done by hand, and if you develop in Lightroom it is worth learning. But for most photos headed to Instagram or a travel blog, a well calibrated automatic correction is plenty and saves you the time.

What matters is that the automation measures the photo instead of applying fixed values. A fixed preset treats a photo taken at 5 metres with a strobe exactly like one at 30 metres in ambient light, and it will wreck one of them. An automatic correction that analyses the image works out what that particular photo is missing.

That is how the editor on this site works: it measures the mean of each channel, luminance, contrast and saturation, detects whether the scene is open water or warm-toned, and calculates the gains needed to bring it to the right target. It also compresses the highlights rather than clipping them, so the sun does not burn out.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

If the underlying physics is still unclear, here is why diving photos come out blue. For the judgement side of editing, see how to properly edit a diving photo. And if you are choosing software, the comparison is here.