Thursday, April 9, 2009

Photoshop Workbench 172: Improving the Appearance of Color Infrared

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LifePixel.com makes it possible to convert one of your old digital camera bodies to full-time infrared. Even with this conversion, fresh out of the camera, the images usually look flat and exhibit a significant pink cast. Using a few tricks in Photoshop, it’s possible to transform a digital color infrared image from pink to pleasing.

Today’s image and request were submitted by Tammy Smith. Here’s what she says about the scene:

“This is an infrared image captured on my Nikon D100 which I recently
had converted to Color Infrared by LifePixel. I’m struggling
to get a pretty blue in the sky when I invert the channels as is
suggested on LifePixel’s website. Their site has a picture on the
front page that has a crystal blue sky which I love.

This is a picture of a cottonwood tree and field east of Brighton, CO.
The field is up for sale to a housing developer and I wanted to
capture the serenity of the pastoral life before it disappears.”

If you’re looking for some powerful inspiration today, be sure to check out Dewitt Jones’ “Celebrate What’s Right With The World” presentation at www.celebratetraining.com . Thanks to Steve Orr for directing me to this wonderful site.

5 Responses to “Photoshop Workbench 172: Improving the Appearance of Color Infrared”

  1. Howard Wood Says:
    Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 10:18 pm

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for the IR tutorial. Concerning the custom WB settings, I have two Nikon’s converted, and have generated custom WB to avoid the red cast out of the camera. Unfortunately Adobe software doesn’t recognize the settings and guesses on the WB. And ACR color temperature doesn’t go low enough. So your tutorial was valuable for Nikon Shooters using Photoshop. My choice is to use Nikon Capture NX (in RAW) to set up the image and transfer to PS for color rendering. Adobe really does a lousy job with Nikon RAW images!

    Howard Wood

  2. Matthias Haltenhof Says:
    Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 3:21 am

    Hey Mark,

    good tutorial, it made me go out and shoot same infrared again. as howard already said: for Canon users it is most important to do the WB in camera and shoot jpg, because ACRs color temperature doesn’t go low enough. there is no way to achieve the same results using raw. does a raw converter exist that goes lower than 2000K?

    Matthias

  3. JetKaiser Says:
    Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 12:44 am

    Beautiful image. This is something I want to get down.

  4. Henry Heerschap Says:
    Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 9:19 am

    Matthias,
    First of all, Capture One 4 goes down to 800 and is a very good converter. Lightroom and ACR can be made to go below 2000K with Adobe’s DNG Profile Editor. This is what I use. More info can be found here:
    http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_Profiles:Editor#tutorial_ir

  5. Henry Heerschap Says:
    Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 9:38 am

    I forgot to mention, outstanding tutorial. I will be incorporating a lot here into my own IR workflow.

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