Correcting for cheap filters

Just before going travelling, I bought a cheap(ish) 10-stop ND filter and a remote timer with the intention of getting some long-exposure shots whilst abroad. As I have the Canon 24-105mm lens I need a 77mm filter, which is unfortunately rather expensive (Bigger filter = more glass = more monies), so I wasn't expecting much out of one which cost me only £29. Unfortunately, as you can see below, I was right. However, with a little love and attention you can correct pretty much all the faults caused by a cheap filter, and end up getting some really great photographs.

This is my shot, straight out of the camera. It's a 30 second exposure, and there's a host of problems to fix. The strong magenta tint, vignette, heavily muted colours and the lack of contrast are all caused by the filter, while the smudges are caused by people and buoys in the sea, who I unfortunately had no control over.

So, let's get to work. We'll start in Lightroom, and then move over to Photoshop later. The first thing to do is fix the white balance and turn on the lens correction profile to correct for distortion and vignette.These two small corrections take about 10 seconds all together and make a world of difference- even if you don't want to spend much time retouching, or don't want to spend any at all, it's still worth doing these.

We're far from finished though. The colours are still a little muted for my taste, so I'll push the vibrance slider up until we're happy with the sky and water, and then correct for the oversaturated yellows in the foreground with the HSL panel, and also add some clarity to make the rocks 'pop'.

The last thing I'll do before moving to photoshop is add some contrast as the filter tends to mute it slightly.

Once in photoshop, the people and buoys are removed by selecting them and then filling with content-aware. After that, some minor local adjustments to colour and contrast, and the image is finished.

If you have any questions about the specifics of these adjustments, or long exposures in general, feel free to email me at benji@the-photography-blog.com, or leave a comment. For anyone interested, the filter I bought was this.