How do I deal with bubbles in underwater portrait photos?

Question

Water Bear Photography · Accepted Answer

Bubbles are an inevitable part of underwater photography and managing them is both a shooting-day skill and a post-production craft. Coach your model to exhale slowly and deliberately through their nose only when bubbles are creatively intended in the frame, such as a dramatic upward exhale.

For frames where bubbles would distract, time your shutter for the brief calm moment just before the model exhales or during a held breath. Position your strobes or lights carefully to avoid lighting stray bubbles drifting through the foreground, because lit bubbles become much harder to remove later. In post-production, use Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush and Content-Aware Fill to remove small isolated bubbles efficiently.

Larger or more complex bubble clusters often require careful cloning from clean adjacent areas, sometimes pulled from a neighboring frame in the same sequence. Build a habit of always capturing a clean background plate at the end of each setup, which provides invaluable source material for advanced cleanup work. Accept that some level of bubble cleanup is normal in editorial underwater work, and budget editing time accordingly when quoting commercial projects.