Colour grading for underwater footage

Water swallows colour. Red is largely gone by five metres, orange follows shortly after, and what is left is the blue-green haze that marks every ungraded underwater shot. Grading underwater is therefore not a matter of adding taste but of recovering what the water took — and that calls for different decisions than footage shot on land.

What makes this different from ordinary grading

A colourist who has never filmed underwater will correct the blue cast until the image is neutral. It is also flat by then. The point is not that the water is blue; the point is that colour falls away with distance, and that falloff is exactly what reads as depth. Polish it out and you are left with an aquarium.

I know for every shot how deep it was taken, under what light, and how much water sat between the lens and the subject. That is the information you build a grade on that is right rather than merely good-looking.

What I do

• Colour restoration. Bringing red and orange back without turning skin orange or costing the water its depth.
• Matching between cameras. Two bodies on the same dive rarely give the same image. I pull them towards each other so a cut does not announce itself.
• Look and finishing. A grade that suits what the production wants to be: documentary, commercial, or somewhere between.
• Other people's material. You do not have to have shot with me. Send what you have and I will see what can be recovered — and whether it is worth it, which I will tell you plainly when the answer is no.

What I need from you

The original material, not an export. Log or raw files hold the information I need; a delivered MP4 has already thrown it away and recovery is limited from there. Beyond that it helps to know the depth each shot was taken at and what lighting was used.