Isabella Tabacchi’s Underwater Photo Editing Tips from Raja Ampat

Isabella's underwater editing skills came first; her own diving came second. Read the full story of her August 2026 workshop at the Raja Ampat SEACAM Center.

Before arriving, she had heard about Raja Ampat's currents from her instructors in Italy and expected them to be difficult. Once underwater, with Papua Diving Resorts' dive guides reading the conditions and positioning her at the right sites at the right moments, the currents turned out to be manageable rather than daunting.

"The memory of the muscles is incredible," she says of returning to diving after two years. Taking her camera housing underwater again worried her more than the diving itself.

"It was not as terrible as I thought," she adds.

Color correction was one of the biggest changes Isabella had to learn when moving from landscape photography to underwater photography. Unlike shooting on land, colors can look different underwater, with some hues becoming weaker as she goes deeper.

"Post-processing is... to bring out colors... to fix backscatter, the noise..." she says, explaining how editing helps restore the colors that are already in the scene. For Isabella, the goal is not to add something that was never there, but to bring out the colors and details that the water has made harder to see.

Water absorbs color at different depths, and red light is absorbed within roughly the first 10 meters, according to NOAA Ocean Exploration. Given the wariness some underwater photographers feel toward digital processing, Isabella sees her approach as a way to show the underwater world and its marine life more accurately, not less.

One insight shaped her editing more than any other: the areas of a frame farthest from the strobe carry a different color cast than the subject in front of it. A single white-balance slider cannot fix the whole image at once.

"It's important to make local adjustments... to fix what we can't fix underwater," she says. She built this eye over several years editing Don Silcock's underwater images before she ever dived herself, a story told in full in the workshop feature.

Isabella's background is landscape photography, and one image from her two weeks shows how that eye translates underwater: a half-and-half, over-and-under shot of Raja Ampat's mangroves.

"I could create a kind of vertical panorama of underwater and outside the water... I really enjoyed to discover new techniques," she says. Don Silcock has pointed to this ability, to see the finished image before she creates it, as central to her work; she calls it her "vision." Across her two weeks, she applied that same eye to wide-angle, wide-angle macro, macro, and focus-bracketed shots, editing each with the same care she gave the split shot.

During her second week in Raja Ampat, Isabella spent her afternoons running the workshop’s digital darkroom sessions, editing attendees’ images and teaching the same color-correction and editing techniques she uses in her own work. Her first week was focused on getting back into the water, getting used to bringing her camera underwater, and building her new skills before sharing what she had learned with the workshop participants.

That combination, a morning in the water and an afternoon at the screen, is what a Raja Ampat SEACAM Center workshop is built to teach: both shooting and editing, not one or the other.

"I felt really, really in a place full of mindfulness, and I'm very happy... to come back next year," Isabella says. She plans to keep developing both her underwater vision and her editing skills on future visits, and she is already booked to return to the Raja Ampat SEACAM Center to teach the digital darkroom sessions at next year's Advanced Workshop, running from August 8 to 14, 2027.

To learn more about the workshops and course offerings, see the Raja Ampat SEACAM Center Workshop Information Sheet.

Ready to Start Your Own Editing Story in Raja Ampat

Isabella Tabacchi's real work in Raja Ampat happened as much at the editing screen as it did underwater, proof that a Raja Ampat SEACAM Center workshop teaches the whole process, from the dive to the final edit. See upcoming Raja Ampat SEACAM Center workshop dates, including next year's digital darkroom sessions, and book your stay at Sorido Bay Resort.

Email info@papua-diving.com to start planning your trip.