tip 9: Infra red techniques

Infra-red has to do with infra red wavelengths of light. I am not going to go into the scientific specifics here, but a good summary about infra-red and its application to photography can be found on wikipedia.

There are several methods of capturing infra-red light using a camera. I will outline the methods I know of below and my experiences with them.

Film: haven't been able to get a hold of any infra red film anywhere, unfortunately.

Filters: There are several IR filters out there, one of the "best" being the hoya r72, which I bought on eBay for $50. The problem with filters is that it increases exposure time and its neccessary to use a tripod while taking the shot. Exposure time at a minimum is 1 second. Another downfall of the long exposure times is motion blur (though this can add to the effect). Below are some pictures I took using the r72 hoya filter (note the camera captures an image that is mauve in appearance, I converted these to monochrome in photoshop and painted in the blue.)





Converting a DSLR
As outlined in the Wikipedia link, removing the film on a digital SLR's sensor is one way to go about taking infra-red shots. Further explanation of this method, with example pictures can be found by clicking this link.

Digital editing
The easiest method of creating infra-red images with a digital camera is through editing in photo shop. There are many tutorials on the internet available but for this tutorial I will use a method I came across in a magazine. The images that work best with this tutorial are ones that predominantly feature green and blue, and so I will be using the image below taken by GMB


I could run through the tutorial used, but it isn't my own so to make things simpler I have turned into a simple action, which you can download here. Save the action onto your hardrive and go into the action toolbar in folder, click load action and select the download IR.atn and click play (the green arrow).

So using this action, the image above is converted to this image below:

As you can see its a little dark, but all of the layers made by the action are adjustable, so by clicking off the levels layer and reducing the grain layer to 50%, we get a more pleasing image closer to what infra-red using film looks like.

I like to keep the blue of water and skies however, so to do this duplicate the background layer and place it above all your IR layers. Set it to soft light and it looks pretty. However for this tutorial reduce the background copy layer to whatever looks good, I used an opacity of 50%. Next add a layer mask and using a soft black brush carefully paint away the coloured vegetation. If you make a mistake simply paint back with a white brush. Its easier to zoom in and painstakingly go around the vegetation with a small brush, however as the image I am using is rather small, I did the sloppy version below:


Next, to give the vegetation a snow-like effect, click CTRL+ALT+shift+E, create a new layer (set to soft light) and using a soft white brush, paint over the vegetation. A soft white layer set to lighten works pretty well also. Lightening the overall image with a curve adjustment layer as well as adding a soft blur layer using Gaussian blur gave me the final image below: