Have any pointers?

[Chrissfishes01]

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Quite a decent result… but the bowl is not a great decor.

A suggestion…

View attachment 249371

Unfortunately, these fish can't be kept with normal decorations! They tend to hurt themselves, haha.

Did you mainly increase the blue channel? I see less yellow, and more blue highlights on the fish.

 

[NS: Nikon Shooter]

Did you mainly increase the blue channel? I see less yellow, and more blue highlights on the fish.

Colour channel manipulations are imagery — another art form in itself.
In photography, tonal control and WB layer adjustment is the way to go.

 

[Chrissfishes01]

Colour channel manipulations are imagery — another art form in itself.
In photography, tonal control and WB layer adjustment is the way to go.

Okay, so I found those tools in my program:

It seems that I ended up somewhere between my first edit and your edit - to my eye (on my monitor) this seems to be a good balance between my first one (which looked a bit too yellow) and the one you posted (which was a bit more blue than I liked).

I can definitely see how these tools (especially the tonal control) are more useful than simple RGB adjustments!

 

[NS: Nikon Shooter]

I can definitely see how these tools (especially the tonal control) are more useful than simple RGB adjustments!

…specially if you work on RAW files where even better results may be expected.

 

[Chrissfishes01]

…specially if you work on RAW files where even better results may be expected.

Alright, I've taken a few in RAW. I've made it through the process of editing one, and I see why it's preferred in some cases - however, I had a difficult time getting accurate color! This first image I tried didn't have much color in it anyway (no plants in the background), but getting the background to be close to real-life took a lot of doing. I'm sure I'm just going about it the wrong way, though. This fish is 1" long, and very fast-moving - pleased to say that this is the first decent shot I've gotten of him in the year I've had him.

Took a shot at this guy again too:

I feel it's still missing something - almost like the gray scales near his tail didn't come out quite right, and like the entire picture has an odd tint to it that I just couldn't figure out how to correct. I like the results better than the one I did last night, though.

Late-night edit:

I had a second picture of the first fish I thought I'd try working on. It was just slightly out of focus, and I wanted to see what kind of leigh-way I had with that while editing. This was the result:

Another image with a color mostly-missing, I think - the green in the plant leaves is very subdued, and the leaf directly behind the fish was completely lost to me. In the JPG my camera takes along with RAW images, that leaf was actually texture-less (like above) but with a green color.

 

[Chrissfishes01]

Continuing to improve, I think? All of these were shot in RAW: