Looking for some photoshop help and also video editing help.

[purbeast0]

I was in the Keys this past weekend and went on a snorkeling trip. I saw this HUGE spotted eagle ray which was a first for me and I was chasing it for a bit underwater then realized my fucking go pro wasn't even recording video. Before I ran out of air I snapped a quick shot of it (which was actually like a 1 frame video, not sure how that happened) and then started a video of it too but it was farther away from me and the visibility was pretty crappy. In the video you can see it a little bit at the beginning then I had to come up for air, then I quickly go back down but it had gone a bit deeper and was very tough to see in person and in the video you can hardly see it.

It really sucks too because when I first started chasing it I was in like 8 feet of water and I was RIGHT on top of it and thought I was recording. I was so excited and overwhelmed that I just completely muffed up my camera operation. Then it got deeper and that was when I was needing to come up for air so it's not so close in the pics. Plus the wide angle go pro doesn't help that either.

The original pic I got from the 1 frame video is here:

Then I ran it through some auto filters in gimp and auto-normalize got it to be as visible as I could get it and it looks kinda cool. You can make out how huge the tail is too. Keep in mind the width of this thing was like 6-7 feet.

So I'm wondering if anyone else knows how to clear up the original image any better than that, if it's even possible.

I'm also wondering if anyone knows of any video software that can "auto normalize" or correct a video that also looks like that. Even though I can only see it for like 2 seconds before I come up for air, it's still kinda cool to see it in motion even for a few seconds.

I can post the original video if necessary, but it's of the same quality of that original image there.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Just using normal windows Photos editing (in Win10), up the contrast and up the clarity, reduce the highlights and maybe up the shadows. Then do that again (can probably reduce or not do the shadows and highlights the 2nd time). It makes it more visible. You might want to boost the color some though via that method.

In other stuff the "Clarity" setting would probably be some sharpness/blur related thing. Those two seem to do the most. Might try just cranking up the contrast levels in a video viewing program and see how much that does.

 

[purbeast0]

Thanks for the pointer. I forgot I had iMovie on here and just played around with it.

This was the best I could do. It's amazing that you can even see it that well initially, and even though it's like a silhouette when I go back down, in the original video you can't see anything at all, it's like just looking into water with poor visibility.

 

[snoopy7548]

Here you go.

 

[SKORPI0]