Night dive video color correction

At night your torch is the sun: full-spectrum light at a metre's distance, so colour is mostly there. What goes wrong is the balance between the torch's warm centre and the blue, noisy edge of the beam. The tool treats night footage as a close-up and corrects with a light hand.

Before

After

What the tool does on night footage

• Detects the scene as Close-up (low blueness, high contrast) and uses the matching preset: modest red compensation, protected highlights, no heavy stretch.
• Balances the torch's colour temperature so white sand reads white instead of yellow.
• Leaves the black water black – the percentile stretch ignores the darkest one percent, so noise is not amplified.

Getting the most out of it

1. Use a wide, even video light rather than a narrow torch; hot spots are harder to balance than a flat beam.
2. Shoot close. Nudibranchs, shrimps and sleeping fish are what night dives are for, and the correction is cleanest at short range.
3. If a clip comes out too warm, set Strength to 60 %; if the edges stay blue, pick the Reef scene manually.

Camera settings for night dives

Night footage is limited by light, not by colour. A few settings make the correction's job easier:

• Lock the white balance (5000–5600 K for a white torch). Auto white balance hunts every time the beam swings over sand or coral, and the tool then has to smooth that out.
• Keep ISO at or below 1600 on a GoPro (800 on phones). Noise that is barely visible on the camera becomes grain once the red channel is stretched – the Denoise option in step 3 helps, but less noise in is always better.
• Light from the side, not from the camera. A torch next to the lens lights up every particle between you and the subject (backscatter); an arm, or a buddy's torch from the side, does not.
• Fill the frame. The closer you are, the less water – and the less correction – between lens and subject.

What to expect in the result

The Night preset assumes your torch is the light source: it keeps the warm torch colour instead of neutralising it to grey, protects the black water from turning blue or purple, and lifts contrast only gently so the dark background stays dark. Subjects in the beam get their reds and oranges back; the edges of the beam fade naturally. If the whole clip was shot with a very strong blue-white video light, pick "Reef" instead – that footage behaves like daylight.

Frequently asked