Editorial

Staff · Issue 142, Jan/Feb 2025 · pp. 4–5

Products mentioned: BackscatterXTerminator, The Underwater Photographer, Underwater Photography Masterclass, 52 Assignments: Underwater Photography

Editorial Peter Rowlands peter@uwpmag.com Backscatter Don’t get me wrong - backscatter is the bain of most underwater photographers’ lives and it was even more so in the film days because there was nothing, other than very expensive retouching, which could be done about it. Enter BackscatterXTerminator - Erin Quigley’s collaboration with clever astro AI developers - and you have a Photoshop plug in which removes backscatter at the push of a button without affecting the overall quality of the subject matter. This is the stuff of dreams and instantly solves a problem which could have taken hours to eliminate manually. And yet, contrary as I can be, I can’t help but wonder that this instant simplicity will lead to a blanket coverage of perfect, clean images - a bit like whitened teeth - and especially in competitions where a judge is looking for images that stand out from the crowd. In this…