Editing underwater photos is a necessary step to bringing your diving shots to life. While there’s no shortage of AI-powered tools promising instant one-click results, they are often optimized for land photography (as UW photographers, we call this topside) but miss the mark when it comes to underwater scenes: pushing colours too far, oversaturating blues, casting unnatural hues, or burning highlights in pursuit of drama. The results can feel artificial, losing the subtlety and authenticity that reflect the true beauty of the underwater world. In my quest to look for the ultimate balance between automation and manual control, I took the opportunity of my recent update to macOS Sequoia on my M1 MacBook Pro to test two very different editing tools and approaches:

I started with a RAW underwater photo, shot on a new dive site in Phú Quốc (see below): the untouched "before" shot. As expected, it had the muted tones typical of underwater images, with greens dominating the frame, while reds barely made an appearance. As explained in more detail in our course, an optical property of water is that it quickly absorbs red light, leaving most underwater photos looking flat and lifeless straight out of the camera.

Apple's Photos app

affinity photo 2

Next, working back from the RAW picture, I brought the same image into Affinity Photo 2 for more control over the editing process. Within 20 minutes, I worked through a range of adjustments: balancing colours, masking specific areas for localized corrections, enhancing textures, and refining lighting. The professional-grade tools allowed me to pull out the hidden reds, correct shadows and highlights, and give the image the nuances it deserved. With a natural balance that Apple’s Photos app couldn’t achieve. the final result felt truer to the real scene and scientific accuracy making the identification of coral families easier.

This experiment reminded me that Apple’s Photos app, while not a professional tool, has its strengths. It still does a decent job at quick edits or culling through hundreds of photos after a dive trip, helping you separate the keepers from the throwaways. You can use it to quickly test out the "potential" of your photos before spending time on them. You may even start applying some basic corrections. But for those standout shots — the ones you truly want to showcase — tools like Affinity Photo 2 or Photoshop offer the precision and control needed to turn a good photo into something extraordinary (see some of our favourite pictures at our Exhibit).

As often is the case, your sweet spot may very well require a blend of different solutions used together for what they are best at. In your quest to essentially find the best tool for the job while remaining mindful of the compromises you're willing to forego, you will create a very personal workflow which in turn will result in personal images and a unique style.

After six days of diving, I typically return with hundreds of photos, but only around 7% — or 20 to 25 images per week — make the final cut. The rest don’t live up to the moment I wanted to capture. Apple’s Photos app (or other free solutions such as Darktable), as a photo library manager, is invaluable for that initial triage, but the real magic happens in a professional suite where your carefully honed editing skills will bring to life the photo you dreamed of.

What about you? How many photos survive your post-dive cull? I’d love to hear how others approach the art of editing and curating their underwater memories. Let us know on our facebook page!