Ocean touch up - remove algae or darker spots

[richc]

Hi, looking for any advice - not an actual edit. This shot has some algae or discoloration in the water in many spots, most notably in the bottom third. I've tried a few different ideas with mixed luck. I am wary of a straight clone or heal as it may take some time. Any ideas on how to remove these spotty areas? Thanks.

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[hawkeye]

I added new layer and painted with blue, set the layer blending mode to Color. I didn't do it all, but it should give you the idea.

 

[Tom Mann]

I took the same general approach as Hawkeye. This was to recolor the algae-ridden areas to a blue that was similar to the blue in the non-algae areas.

However, instead of manually painting in the areas, like Hawkeye did, I used an old plugin called, "Color Mechanic", to automatically select and recolor the appropriate areas:
http://www.dl-c.com/site/products/buy-cm.php

Here are the settings that I used:



So, my entire workflow as to first, bring the image into PS through ACR. I used that step to brighten the image a bit. After that, it only took about 3 or 4 minute playing with Color Mechanic to get the result shown below.

Unfortunately, changing only the color is not terribly satisfactory because the surface of the water has a different texture in the algae ridden areas, so just changing the color isn't going to help out changes in luminosity (ie, the texture), but it's perhaps a bit better than before...

HTH,

Tom M

 

[dangerboy]

FYI, that's not algae, but reflection of the island in the background of the image. Also the blue is less the colour of the water and more the colour of the sky reflecting on it. Regardless, the first solution probably creates the most realistic colouring given that the water in the Pacific Northwest isn't cyan, but a deep blue/green. I would then do some adjustments with Levels and Hue/Saturation to the whole image to brighten it up a bit.

 

[IamSam]

I would then do some adjustments with Levels and Hue/Saturation to the whole image to brighten it up a bit.

As the forum is a teaching forum, would you mind posting an image of your solution? Let's see how yours would compare.

 

[dangerboy]

so i applied a bit of a median filter to soften the jpeg compression, did the colour layer in a mid-tone blue sampled from the water to colours the water more evenly, adjusted the levels of the whole image to deepen the darks and lighten the lights, brought down the lightness and saturation of the blue using an HSB adjustment to make the water more realistically coloured, and then adjusted the levels of the blue layer of the water to bring a bit of green into it.