Need Tips for color enhancing from a pro.

[WlNTER]

Hi everyone, Im looking for some help from you photoshop pros

Im working as a photo analyst for a scientific research project that is estimating sardine populations off the coast of north america. In a nutshell me and about 4 other guys are going to be staring at pictures of water until the wee hours in the morning all month with the hopes that in the end we can identify a rough estimation of sardine populations. Now me and all the other guys are not exactly what you would call photoshop pros, but between the 5 of us we know that adjusting the light levels, saturation, hue, and a few other things we can see the schools of fish pop out in all the photos. This is a lengthy process and if done for each picture we would take all year to finish when we only have a month. I was wondering if anyone on here had any experience doing this sort of thing or would be able to advise me on how to do this quick and/or make the schools pop up extremely clearly.

Heres an example of what we're doing
Original photo (shot by a plane at 8000ft)




Post lightroom editing, and touch ups in photoshop we get



Ive resized the after picture to make it smaller but you get the drift. The dark spots are the schools of fish and what we are after in the photo. At best we get a few that stand out in extreme contrast to the water but most of the time it takes 20minutes of fiddling around with settings to get barely darker smudges to come out for us.

All comments welcome, thanks

[mquis]

If you have made it for one picture you can save it to an action file and then just execute that one for all other pictures. So you basically do it for 1 image. And how to do this you will find plenty of info on the internet Gl!

[Jiax]

Mqis is absolutely right. You can make an action and apply all your adjustments to each picture fairly quickly. You can even go back then and fiddle with individual pictures if needed.

The reason I posted though was to ask if you've worked with curves? In your original example photo, I've found that if I put on a curves adjustment layer, hit auto, and then bend the curve upward in the middle, the two dark spots pop out fairly quickly. There's a number of approaches you can take to this, but in the end, you'll want to follow Mqis's advice and automate the process once you've got it right.