The Pictures behave very differently in your photo Editor of choice. Highlights can not be retrieved as easily, dark parts of your picture are usually lost.
This all may seem like it has any use, but there are a couple of things you can do with just a Program like Lightroom to get some decent quality and even enhance them.
I've learned this recently when my Dad gave me some of his underwater Pictures of Fish among some other things.
A side note to that topic: Water cuts out most of the light and you'll and up with a picture pretty flat, dull and boring. (Not the good kind of flat) Meaning, all the colors are lost (red is among the first colors to disappear) and so are a lot of the details you may have seen with your naked eye.
So here is what I did to make this picture look better....
First I adjusted the White Balance settings to match the blue to a darker and more vibrant blue. This depends highly on the Picture, for some it's necessary to decrease temperature and for others it's required to add warm colors after that adjust the Tint accordingly.
After that I moved on to the basic settings. Said underwater pictures were almost always overexposed so I almost always pulled down the exposure just a bit in this case -0.40. Then increased the Contrast to get some more Details, pulled down the Highlights to get some details back in the Highlights and pulled up the Shadow slider to get some details back in the dark areas. I also increased the Whites but this depends on your picture in my case mine has gotten a little dark for my taste so I increased the Whites and also increased the blacks to get some juicy contrast. Just remember you can't push the image as far.
In this picture I wanted it to look very crisp and sharp, so I also increased the clarity but you often have to go easy on that setting since it adds a lot of noise.
To bring back some of the color I increased vibrance quite a bit but pulled down saturation just slightly to make it more natural.
In addition, tweak the Tone Curve a bit to get the Contrast/Exposure you want. For underwater Pictures I found that increasing highlights and Lights as well as the shadows and lowering the darks to be extremely good looking, it gives you a contrasty but detailed look.
Then I moved on to HSL. I can't give you a go-to answer on that one since this really really just depends on the picture you have taken but here's what I did. I tried to make the fish tails really good looking and a point to catch the eyesight. So I increased the greens and adjusted the aqua and blue tones until it became the color of my liking. Then I moved on to the Luminance tab to set the Luminance of each color, I wanted to make the water look fresh and clean so I dropped down the blues to achieve that distinct look and separate the fish from the background.
That's how you have to go through all of your pictures, what do you want to enhance, decrease, make brighter, darker etc.
Last but not least, the sharpening. It's very important in those low-res, high-compression pictures but it also has to be used very carefully, if you increase it too much, you might actually worsen the quality.
I found a good amount to be around 40 to 70 and leave the over sliders alone, I only use the masking sometimes.
Just remember always adjust according to your image and never overstretch its compression also know what you want the picture to look like. Some of these files are below one Mb so they're extremely high compressed and don't leave you much room to work with.
Also if you really want to use noise reduction use it with caution, especially low-res pictures don't react all to well to NR and you might end up with a soft picture.
All the things I did you can do in most editors out there the buttons are just in different places. (e.g. Apple Aperture)
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Take Care
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