We’re not sure how many of you take photos while underwater, but underwater photos is a pretty common thing, especially amongst those who enjoy diving and love documenting their dives and also capturing photos of sealife. However, one of the problems with underwater photography is that sometimes the water can add an unnecessary hue to your photos.
This means that all the vibrant colors that you see with your own eyes might not be able to be replicated with your camera, which can be a bit frustrating for some. However, thanks to the work of oceanographer and engineer Derya Akkaynak who collaborated with Tali Treibitz from the University of Haifa, they have come up with an algorithm dubbed “Sea-thru” that can “remove” the water from underwater photos.
What this means is that the resulting photos will look bright and vibrant as if you were seeing it on land, and not through a body of water which can sometimes distort the colors due to the way light moves through water. This algorithm was created by taking more than 1,100 images from two optically different water bodies, and then later used to train a model to compensate for the way light is scattered through the water.
The resulting images are actually pretty stunning and unlike using applications like Photoshop which artificially enhances images by pumping up the contrast and saturation, this algorithm is more about coaxing out the “true” colors.