Pixiq

June in San Francisco is when summer low tides permit beach walking way beyond the normal shoreline. You can read in the tide tables here that the middle of June in 2011 will have the month's lowest minus tides. The problem for photographers is to plan the excursion so there is minimum water and maximum light for the best sea creature and rock formation picture taking.

The five photos below are from June, 2009. The first four were taken on a very foggy morning, and the final image is from a rare sunny morning. All images are full frame, made with consumer fixed lens cameras.

Photoshop CS5 was used to enhance each photo, as described briefly below. My goal is to demonstrate visually how lousy lighting and a potentially interesting subject can be rescued from the digital dumpster with a few clicks.

China Beach and Baker Beach are adjacent, in the Sea Cliff area of northwest San Francisco. Beach access is free, and parking is close and plentiful. Dogs are not allowed on China Beach, but they are allowed on Baker Beach. The two beaches are not normally contiguous, due to severe rock walls and pounding surf. For almost a full hour when minus tides are at their maximum, you can dash quickly from one beach to another.

You won't have much company walking or taking pictures at these beaches. China Beach is your best bet, especially the southern area that is usually completely underwater.

High natural walls give Sea Cliff its name. The rocks you see in this pair of photos are never visible except at very low tides. I don't know how this lone tree survives the relentless salt water.

My wife hates the composition and content of this photo. I like the way the rocky bottom half draws your eye into the incongruous vegetation and eroded wall base.

The top photo is my original. The bottom photo used a position 0.6 to the right with the center gray gamma slider in Photoshop's LEVELS to add power and punch to the scene.

A rock is a rock, except when it's a home. How much more foggy and washed out could the original photo below be?

There is an Offset slider in Photoshop CS5's EXPOSURE trio of settings that I cranked way up to bring out detail and depth in this micro underwater island that is rarely visible.

Texture can be surprisingly varied in underwater environments. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I call the upper creatures mussels. What I used to call starfish are in fact sea stars. The former typically lives above the latter, as seen in the original low contrast photo below.

Again using LEVELS in Photoshop, this time I moved the central gamma slider to the right and the right white point slider to the left, as in the screen shot above. Visual intensity is the result, as seen below.

Sea anemones and sea stars frequently hug one another at the base of China Beach's low tide rocks. The original image below has more glare than anything else.

Boosting only the Contrast in Photoshop CS5's BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST pair of sliders minimizes glare below while drawing our eyes into the intimate and colorful relationships between these shapely beings.

Every Nemo photo essay, master class, and tutorial has to have one wacky, idiosyncratic image enhancement. I couldn't get satisfying color results using Photoshop on the photo below of the anemone underneath a trio of hanging sea stars.

Using the handy QUICK SELECTION TOOL in Photoshop CS5 I selected just the sea life. Then I INVERTED the selection, and used the BLACK & WHITE adjustment sliders to bring out the detail in the background. Finally I used only the SATURATION slider in HUE/SATURATION to intensify the primary subject.

No, it's not upside down. This is a favorite photo from my high times during San Francisco's 2009 low summer tides. It may not be to your liking. Either way, I hope this tutorial essay inspires you to take pictures in places that don't normally exist.

If you like this approach to photography and software enhancement, please look at my Pixiq master class on Cloud Photography plus my other recent contributions here.