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Digital IR - Help

PostPosted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 4:44 am
by chuck_buhecker
I was wondering if anyone could stop by my area and see if they can assist me in figuring out what I am missing in my conversion from RAW->WB adjust -> R/B swap. http://www.pbase.com/chuck_buhecker/jul ... l_infrared
Thanks in advance[/url]

Digital IR reply

PostPosted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 2:29 pm
by ianbirch
From my experience it is the fact you are using a high end DSLR that is the
problem.

They do not do a good job of recording IR because they have effective internal IR blocking filters (i think) . This is why I feel your exposures are so long.

Regards Ian

IR workflow

PostPosted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 4:18 pm
by jeffreyk
DSLR's are great for IR. I use the Tiffen 87 but also have a Hoya R72 that i havent got a chance to play with yet. Your camera will do very well with both. Some other tips I can suggest from looking at your current gallery would be.
1.Shoot with your back to the sun, shooting into the sun with IR can be a problem.
2. Make sure your shooting raw and use Nikon capture to raise those overall exposure of the image. Nikon's D-Lighting is far better then photoshops. As you will see in my workflow I use it to get my image to the levels and whitebalance that i want before sending to PS in 16bit.
3. Take a look at the EXIF data on my gallery. All of those images so far are taken with the Tiffen 87, but I look forward to trying the Hoya.
http://www.pbase.com/jeffreyk/infrared

Here is my IR workflow.

1. Set camera to manual mode, and raw data.

2. Find a nice bright patch of grass, and custom white balance on it with filter.

3. Set the camera up and compose, and focus with the filter off.

4. Turn focus to manual, (To stop it from hunting around with the filter)

5. Put the filter on and check exposure, adjust the shutter speed until you are over exposing the image by quite a bit. Take a few practice shots to get it so that it is nice and bright but not overexposed.

6. Take the photo, and repeat steps 3-5 till you have lots of pictures.

7. Transfer your images to your photomanager (i use picasa 2)

8. Pick an image that looks good, and open with Nikon capture or Adobe Raw

9. Tweak White Balance or fix it if you forgot to set a custom one.

10. Adjust lighting and exposure

11. Import to PS

12. From here I have a PS script that does the following

1.Creates a Channel Mixer layer with the following settings

Red Output: Red = 0%, Green = 0%, Blue = 100%

Green Output: Red = 0%, Green = 100%, Blue = 0%

Blue Output: Red = 100%, Green = 0%, Blue = 0%

2.Creates a Curves later above that, with Auto (I tweak it later)

3.Creates a Saturation layer above that with the folling settings

Reds: -40 saturation (Always have to tweak this)

Cyans: +30 saturation

Blues: +50 saturation

13. From here you should have a image that is usable as B&W and almost there for colour. But from here on every image is very diffrent. Here are somethings that I usally do:

1.Create a new layer and run Noise Ninja on it. Use a layer mask to apply it only to the sky and water areas.

2. Soft light layer (create a new layer and apply softlight blendmode)I use it to enhance tones a bit.

3. I usaully end up with a couple levels layers with masks to add contrast to specific areas, so I will adjust levels till the high and low lights clip, then mask those areas to bring the detail back.

4. Sharpen

Reply to Jeffrey

PostPosted: Sun Jul 16, 2006 9:57 am
by ianbirch
Hello Jeffrey, I have looked at your infra red, very good, but it does show some of the characteristics of long exposure such as unsharp foliage due to wind movement. This can some times be used to good effect but not always.

Also in your procedure guide you mention some of the things I found annoying when I tried out my 300D, such as having to pre focus then put the camera on manual then put the filter back on. Another one being the hit and miss exposure calculation. Also
high noise levels.

The upshot of which was that I bought a Minolta Dimage 7 specifically to take infra red. The advantages of this camera are 5.2 mega pixels( almost as much as my 300D ) a typical exposure of 1/8s or higher, a live preview of the image, and auto focus through the filter.
I use the Hoya R72.

Any road up, this is just by way of explaining what I meant by saying DSLRs aren't very good, I didn't mean to say that
they couldn't be used at all.

Cheers Ian

PostPosted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 7:00 pm
by lasombradelosdiablos
To the original poster ... taken with the same camera you have.

Image

... what was that about DSLR's and IR again?

I've broken all the rules:

* Shot facing the sun
* Composed blind with the filter on. What? I like to guess.
* No tripod ... used a 24-120mm Nikkor VR lens and held ... really ... still.
* No channel swapping.
* Did not shoot in RAW / JPG Fine
* I had sweat smeared on the damn filter (sigh) it was hot and I couldn't get it perfectly clean.
* I didn't even crop it.

Okay I didn't break ALL the rules:

* Shutter speed was about 1/25
* ISO 400
* Custom WB
* Levels adjustment, hue/saturation, brightness/contrast, unsharp mask ( a tad)

http://www.nvisiblephoto.com

PostPosted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 7:15 pm
by lasombradelosdiablos
Oh I forgot to mention ...

Nikon D50 .. Non-modified

Hoya R72

Want more?

go here

http://www.nvisiblephoto.com

To the O.P. ... check my settings against yours and contact me ... we'll get you figured out.

digital IR reply

PostPosted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 8:23 am
by merlotadl
I am also using a camera similar to yours (Nikon D70) with a Hoya R72 filter. From what I can gather, Canons are more heavily filtered against IR than Nikons and so need greater exposures to get equivalent results. Don't try to work by the exposure settings that Canon users quote or it will be misleading, though in the end both can produce beautiful IR images.

I agree with the previous poster "lasombradelosdiablos" (please find a shorter user-name! :) ) that all the so-called rules of post-processing are there to be broken. With a little experimentation and imagination you will be surprised and delighted at the variety of effects you can achieve quite easily. Contact me if you would like me to send you my procedures. See one of my IR galleries at:

http://www.pbase.com/merlotadl/infra_red

Here are a few examples:


Image


Image


Image


Brian