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Infrared (IR) Photography
Taking and processing infrared photos
Requirements
If you want to take infrared images you first need an IR filter and a camera that can “see” IR light. Since some cameras have a built-in filter that prevents IR rays from coming through, you have to check if your camera can see IR light by pointing a remote control to the camera (with no filter attached). If you can see the infrared LED of your remote control glow then your camera is capable of taking IR shots.
There’s a variety of IR filters available. A good standard filter is the Hoya R72 infrared filter. The “72″ indicates that it will block light of wavelengths of more than 720 nm. You can also buy a colored IR filter for better contrast in different situations but if you have Photoshop you don't really need one because all the level adjustments can be done there.
Taking the Shot
Rivers, lakes and trees are great spots for infrared images. Fortunately, there's a river flowing right through our village, so I don't have to walk too far to find a place like this:
The clouds and their reflections on the water looked perfect to me, so I put my camera (a Sony Alpha) on the tripod, screwed the Hoya R72 IR filter on the lens and shot away.
Due to the long exposure time, apart from the tripod you should use a remote control or the self-timer to avoid vibrations. For best results, wait until there is no wind and the leaves on the trees are not moving.
I experienced that a white balance of 2500K G9 works best for my camera but different camera models might require different settings (that's why the best thing is to shoot RAW images because then you can easily change the white balance with the computer and without any loss of quality). Since the Hoya R72 IR filter is almost black it always takes some time to get a sharp image with the auto focus. Once the focus is good enough I set the camera to manual focus (to "lock" the focus) and shot several images with different exposures in RAW mode. Thus I can choose the best exposure later because the display of the camera might not show the brightness accurately. Moreover, many different exposures allow me to create an HDR image if desired. When I was back home I chose this image for post-production:
The exposure is just right; nothing is over- or underexposed.
Processing the image
I imported the RAW file to Photoshop without adjusting anything at first. Then I cropped the image at the bottom to get a width/height ratio of about 1.6:1, which equals roughly the golden mean and is more eye-pleasing:
After that I had Photoshop adjust the levels automatically by pressing Shift+Ctrl+L:
Then I used the channel mixer (Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer) to get a blue hue. I chose "Red" as the output channel and moved the source channel slider of red to 0% and the slider of blue to 100%. Then I chose "Blue" from the output channel menu and slided red to 100% and blue to 0%. Afterwards the image looked like this:
Now that doesn't look too bad, does it? But still there's a lot to be done. I found the saturation a bit too much so I decreased it with the PowerRetouche Saturation plug-in (setting -90/photographic):
In order to increase the contrast by making the trees a bit whiter (they still have a magenta hue) and the sky darker I applied a red filter with the PowerRetouche Studio Black and White plug-in.
Alternatively, you can experiment with the Photoshop photo filters (Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter). However, there's still too much magenta in the trees. So I set the saturation (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation) of magentas to -75, of reds to -70 and of blues to -50 in order to make them look more natural:
For the last step I used the dodge tool (O) and set a few highlights on the trees to make them look more plastic and whiter. With the elliptic marquee tool (feather: 100 pixels) I selected some trees to increase the contrast and to bring out the branches more. Before submitting the image online I resized and sharpened it so that it looks good on a computer screen.
