Level up your underwater GoPro footage! The Ultimate GoPro Underwater Settings and Colour Correction Editing Tutorial and Guide. You're here as you've seen how good GoPro footage looks when it's posted by professional filmmakers and content creators, and you're wondering why your footage doesn't look quite as good.
This isn't just a question on GoPro's or action cameras, it's a question that applies to every single camera product launch. Automatic modes even on the most expensive cameras are never very good, and they don't enable creators full control to edit their footage in post production. The tip here is simply taking control away from the camera, and giving it to the shooter or the user.
This is exactly what we're going to do by enabling ProTune on GoPro cameras. We give ourselves way more power to really edit our footage and take it to levels the automatic modes simply can't. It does require a little bit more work and editing in post production, but it is well worth the effort!
Before I get started it’s worth saying that I’ve used pretty much the exact same settings on every GoPro I’ve owned since the Hero 3+ to the Hero 5, the Hero 7 and now the Hero 10 so it doesn’t really matter what model you own, if it has ProTune you can follow these steps.
First things first, for underwater use I always the highest frame rate that offers 60fps, so that we can slow down our footage in post, for the hero 10 this 5.3k at 60fps, for anything older than I think a Hero 6 this would be 1080p.
I also always keep the lens set to wide, for underwater I don’t particularly like the linear field of view, and if you have superview turned on, definitely turn that off now to avoid that fish eye bubble look.
Moving onto stabilisation, I always leave hypersmooth set one stop below boost mode, just as I feel boost really crops the frame in, and we don’t really need that much stabilisation underwater. On land this isn’t an issue, go nuts, enable boost horizon levelling and your shots will be buttery smooth.
All of the automatic features, I generally just turn off.
Moving down we want to enable ProTune. This is where we get into the nitty gritty, and fine tune our GoPro to give us unedited ‘raw’ footage if you will. These settings in essence remove the cameras ability to edit our footage for us, and give us all the power to make the footage look how we want it to in post.
First up turn your bit rate all the way up, this is like a quality slider, the more the better. I usually leave my shutter on auto, but I will always turn my exposure compensation or EV to -0.5. This is really important to ensure that your GoPro doesn’t overexpose the highlights of your image. The shadows will be slightly darker, but it is much easier to brighten these in post, than trying to save blown out, over exposed footage.
You will want to set your white balance to native, especially underwater as any other setting will result in green footage that is much harder to fix in post. Native will give you more flexibility to get those underwater colours back.
With your ISO, always set your minimum iso to the lowest value, but for the maximum iso 800 should be as high as you want to go. This is simply just an artificial brightness slider, but the higher the iso, the more grainy your footage will become.
The default sharpness setting has always been high on gopros, you definitely want to reduce that the either low or medium.
For the colour setting, you want to change it off GoPro colour, and set it to flat. What this does simply put, is it now means that your GoPro will not edit your footage for you, it will give you way more power in post to make the footage look how you want it to.
But what you’re going to see now is footage that looks very dull, there’s no contrast or vibrance, and it’s just generally pretty boring. But remember a lot of the settings we just changed removed any automatic editing done by the GoPro, and instead gave us the power to edit the footage how we want it. Meaning that we now have to edit our footage, and if we do, the results will be far far better.
To do this I use editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro, but if you don't have access to this I would definitely recommend learning on Davinci Resolve as it's free industry grade software. It's hard to describe the process of colour grading in words, but I hope the video tutorial on how to edit your underwater footage helps you!
For more visit my website: www.tomparkphotography.com
& check out my Instagram www.instagram.com/tomsunderwaterphotography
Camera Gear Used:
- GoPro Hero 10 Black
- Sony A7SIII
- Sony A7III
- Atomos Ninja V
- Sony 16-35mm f4
- Sigma 24-70 f2.8 Art
- Sony 12-14mm G
- Sony 50mm f1.8
- Tamron 70-300
- Sony 18-105mm G F4
- Sigma 35mm F1.4
- Isotta Underwater Housing
- OrcaTorch D950v and D910v Video Lights
- Zhiyun Weebill S Gimbal
- DJI Mavic Air 2S Drone
