I recently removed Adobe CS2 from my laptop to clear up some hard drive space (Note: you can legally continue to run older versions of Adobe CS even after you’ve upgraded, and it’s probably a good idea to keep your older versions unless you need the disk space). Well, today, I went to open a document that I had created prior to removing CS2, when lo and behold, Illustrator CS4 informed me that Century Old Style Std was missing. Now, I had created this document in Illustrator CS4, so it didn’t dawn on me right away that the removal of CS2 could be the source of the problem, so I wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure out how this font could have been deleted from my Windows>Fonts folder. As it turns out, it wasn’t deleted from there at all, because it was never there in the first place.

When installing Adobe CS2 on a Windows machine,  Open Type Fonts are stored in Program Files>Common Files>Adobe>Fonts (on a Mac they are stored in [Macintosh HD] /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts/). As long as you leave the fonts there, you can upgrade to newer versions of Adobe CS products and the fonts will still be accessible. For example, upgrading to CS4 will not wipe out your CS2 fonts from this folder. HOWEVER, if at some point you decide to remove your older CS or CS2 versions, the uninstaller will remove the fonts associated with the Creative Suite version you are removing (I think this only applicable to CS and CS2 removal, but I’m not positive).

The easiest way to prevent this from happening is, of course, not to remove your older versions of Adobe CS. If you’re like me and you’ve already made that mistake, hopefully, you still have your CS or CS2 installation disks laying around (or better yet, you still have the older versions on another machine). To fix the situation, either completely reinstall your old CS version(s) or copy the missing fonts you need off another machine that you are LEGALLY running the older versions on (the Adobe Creative Suite license typically allows activation on 2 machines) and paste them into the folder mentioned in the paragraph above. Restart your Adobe application, and you should be all set.

Original Unmodified Underwater Photo of a Great White Shark

Open the original file in PhotoShop. Before you make any other modifications to the file, create a duplicate layer of the original image. This can either be done through the main menu (Layers>Duplicate Layer) or by clicking on the original layer in the Layers Palette and dragging it to the New Layer icon. (We make a duplicate, so that we have a backup of the original if we decide we don’t like the changes we’ve made and need to start over in the same file.)

Creating a duplicate image using the Layers Palette

You’ll notice in the example above that I have renamed the original layer name from “Background” to “Original Image.” For the sake of keeping things organized, I will rename the duplicate layer to “Working Copy,” as this will be the layer we will be making changes to. (Make sure that the “Working Copy” is selected as the active layer for the next step.)

Rename our duplicate layer to "Working Copy"

Now, we are ready to remove some of that pesky deep blue color cast. There are countless ways to do this including using the photo filter layers, adjusting hue and/or color balance, modifying color channels, etc. For this example, however, we are going to do a quick and easy fix using PhotoShop’s “Match Color” function. This can be accessed through the main menu (Image>Adjustments>Match Color).

Select Match Color from Image>Adjustments

This will bring up the Match Color dialog box. The only options that we will interested in for this particular example will the the “Neutralize” checkbox and the “Fade” slider. Click on the checkbox to “Neutralize” the image. (Make sure that you also have the “Preview” checkbox clicked, if it is not checked by default.) You should now see a noticeable difference in the color cast of your image. From my experience, 100% neutralization tends to over-correct and give the image a color cast that leans more toward red. This is where the “Fade” slider comes into play. Adjust the amount of fade until you achieve the results you’re looking for. In my example, it will be about 40%.

Click on "Neutralize" and then use the "Fade" slider to adjust the image

Once you are satisfied with your results, click “OK” to apply the changes to your “Working Copy” layer. You should now have a color corrected image as your “Working Copy.” This is what my image looks like, at this point.

Color Corrected Image

I’ve found that removing the blue color casts sometimes lightens my image a little more than I would like, so I often will use a Levels adjustment layer to correct this and increase contrast a little bit. If you are not familiar with adjustment layers, they can be added via the Layers Palette. (I don’t have time to get into a description of adjusting levels for this post, sorry!)

Adding a Levels adjustment Layer from the Layers Palette

Using the Levels adjustment layer I “tighten” the black point slider up a bit on the Histogram and end up with my final product. When using the Levels tool, alt-clicking on the black point and white point sliders will give you a preview of what will be lost from the image given the placement of the slider. “Tightening” the white point results in a loss of detail that I’m not happy with, and, yes, I adjusted the Levels purely based on the resulting image.

Levels Histogram

Now, that I’m satisfied with my adjustments in the Levels layer, I click “OK” and and left with the resulting image below.

Final Image

This is a quick and easy way to bring out the colors of underwater images and is a great method to use if you’re short on time and have a lot of underwater images to edit.