I experimented a bit again with my 40mm macro lens. I had a mineral water bottle on my desk and saw those very tiny bubbles. I thought the bubbles looked cool and wanted to take a picture with my macro lens. I didn’t know if it would work out well, because the bubbles were millimeter-sized. And it became a challenge to take crisp photos but then I did set up my tripod and opened the curtains to get more daylight. I had difficulties to get all bubbles sharp, but I think this is a problem with macro photography and maybe it’s not possible without focus stacking. But what do I know, it’s my first macro lens and I still try things out.

Anyway, I liked the experiment and now I wanted to transfer the image to my PC for editing. I forgot to adjust ISO manually, which is why there was a lot of noise in the background. So, I had to use noise reduction. But afterwards I masked the bubbles to make them sharper again. I tried different white balance settings and I can tell you that I don’t use Tungsten very often, but in this case, it looked perfect. I think we associate the color blue with water, and it worked so well in this case.

I also increased exposure but just a tiny bit and I added a tiny amount of contrast. I lowered the point of true black and increased the white. I also added more clarity and added a tiny bit more vibrancy. Since all sharp bubbles were at the top, and my eyes were always wandering to the blurry bubbles at the bottom when I looked at the image, I decided to flip the image vertically to have the sharp bubbles at the bottom. Finally, there was a bit of cropping. Here is how the image looked like before I started to edit it…