Mark's almighty IR tutorial!

Fenster

...will be coming soon. Tonight. Probably.

Watch this space!

mikeanywhere

About bloody time, now I can complete those IR pics I took months ago. Ok, it was 2 or so weeks back but it feels like it.

Anyone want to buy a small lens IR filter due to some cockup on sizes??

Fenster

I can swap you for a 58mm one

sineadw

Teaser trailer?

How much are IR filters anyway? And do you have to do something to the sensor? Those shots you put up are awesome Mark.

GristlyEnd

mikeanywhere wrote:

Anyone want to buy a small lens IR filter due to some cockup on sizes??

What size filter Mike?

mikeanywhere

DarrenG wrote:

What size filter Mike?

Its 52mm but if Mark is gonna swap (& i got the wrong one from him) then I will see what he has to say first.

trooney

sineadw wrote:

Teaser trailer?

How much are IR filters anyway? And do you have to do something to the sensor? Those shots you put up are awesome Mark.

They seem pretty reasonable on e-bay.
I was under the impression that your sensor would need some 'adjustment' if it couldn't detect IR. The acid test being to view the little IR led on the front of any remote through your view finder whilst pressing the buttons on the remote. If you see it flashing then your camera is seeing IR light.

Roen

The IR filter is placed in front of the sensor, not in the light path that is visible through the viewfinder Trooney.

Fenster

Roen wrote:

The IR filter is placed in front of the sensor, not in the light path that is visible through the viewfinder Trooney.

The filter goes on the end of the lens unless you're using a modded camera.

Roen

The low pass IR filter that sits in front of the sensor is what I'm referring to. Not the Wratten 1B or whatever you stick on the camera is called.

Roen

This gadget

Fenster

I need to actually read threads more.

GristlyEnd

mikeanywhere wrote:

Its 52mm but if Mark is gonna swap (& i got the wrong one from him) then I will see what he has to say first.

If Mark doesn't swap, I'll take it.

Fenster

I promised it to Al. I should actually consult him at this point.

I'll definately have something up tonight. I need to have a shower and rot my brains in videogames for a few hours first.

mikeanywhere

Fenster wrote:

I promised it to Al. I should actually consult him at this point.

The 52mm??

Fenster

The 58mm. I'll still swap with you if you need it.

Fajitas!

Bah!

Thanks!

For those of you who can't wait for your IR tutorials, here's this chap! Link

Use that until the godlike Mark returns!

mikeanywhere

Fenster wrote:

The 58mm. I'll still swap with you if you need it.

Good man, thank you!!

digitalage

You could just buy an old old canon G3 and modify it yourself for infra red photography, I might go that route myself as it would be cheaper than buying a 77mm hoya R72, heres a good like on infra red photography, look under DIY projects.

http://www.lifepixel.com/

Fenster

Part 1, actually getting the bloody photo:

Preamble:

So you want to shoot digital infrared, eh?

I'm going to be my typically negative self and say that there's an inordinate disparity between the effort and results. I've taken 30 or 40 photos in one go (at 05-120 seconds per exposure) and thrown them all out as I wasn't happy.

Still, when I get a great photo, I get a great photo, as borne out by the fact most of my consistently popular pictures just about everywhere are IR. There's lots of ways to process an IR photo: You can leave it as-is, you can convert the colours back to a semblance of “normal.” It's surreal. My preferred methord is to convert the photo I take into high-contrast black and white, which generally look pretty spiffy, and also incidently what I'll base this around.

There's also lots of ways to take the photo for that matter. There's film, modded digital cameras, and even a select few (mostly Sony) cameras with a native infrared mode. My own work has been with Hoya filters on the end of various pieces of glass.

I've used varying cameras and lenses over the past nine months for this, as listed below:

Canon EOS-350D
Canon EOS-400D
Canon EOS-30D

Canon f/4-5.6 18-55mm
Canon f/1.8 50mm
Canon f/2.8 28mm
Sigma f/2.8-4 28-70mm

Hoya R72 near-infrared filters in 52 and 58mm sizes.

A tripod is also a must. As far as usability goes, the best combination for me would be the 400D with the 28mm lens. The camera for it's “friendly” baffles and the lens for it's sheer awesomeness. My one gripe about the lens is that it's field of view is annoyingly narrow, which limits a lot of shots I've wanted to try over time. I hope to get a filter for my 17-85 after I leave for America.

Going down in usability, the 350D is a horrible camera and the 30D maybe middling. The 50mm is about on par with the 28mm, with the advantage of a bigger aperature for a shallower depth of field and the disadvantage (again) for narrow field of view making actually having a use for the filter awkward. The two zoom lenses has horrible hotspot problems and I'd really advise everyone to go out and get a prime if you want to do this.

Hotspots come from light bouncing around the inside of the lens and show up in your photo as a very obvious white spot in the middle of the picture. There's no way around hotspots other than to purchase a lens (most primes are good) that's suitable for IR. Did I mention I swear by my 28mm f/2.8?

Enough preamble, advice!

White Balance:

This is something that took me an embarassingly long amount of time to figure out. The white balance on your camera at the time of shooting has much more of an effect on the image than with conventional photography. Essentially the warmer your WB is, the brighter the final image will be. The best way to see this is to open up this file in Lightroom or your raw editior of choice and drag the white balance slider up and down. As well as colours shifting, your image will get much brighter or darker depending on the temperature. The most effective way to get it right is to just to take your camera off auto-white balance and instead set it to whatever the light is like. Shooting in shade? Use Shadow. And so on.

Due to their noise levels, infrared photos really don't take being pushed all too well, so if you can get the image right at the time of shooting. Looking at the preview on your camera, the histogram should be just left of centre and the colours should be pink/red without being too bright or dark. Blood red and purple and just naughty and right out.

Skies and Polarisation:

Skies are a fascinating thing in IR, as they're normally darker than the ground because of a few very technical reasons. Which is to say that with just a circular polariser you can get a completely black sky if you're lucky.

Clouds are the exception, as with foliage they are extremely bright reflectors and if you're shooting in daylight with scattered cloud, you pretty much need a polariser to avoid random white blobs in the sky

On the other hand, if you're shooting somewhere dull (say a forest) you'll get a brighter sky, although it's rare that it'll be blown out and it's normally easier to recover. As a rule of thumb, on a bright day the sky will be about a stop darker than the ground.

Water's also very dark in infrared and generally makes for an interesting backdrop.

Exposure:

There's little point here giving advice on exposure as it's going to vary from photo to photo. Aim for an exposure just left of centre in the histogram, playing with aperature, shutter speed and ISO. There's different mixes to give different results.

Cover up!

Light spilling in through the viewfinder can be a problem when there's a strong light source (such as uh, the sun) behind you. Canon cameras at least come with a clip to cover the viewfinder for just such purposes on their strap. You know when you've had such flare when there's a bright blue streak/blob on your IR photo.

Composition:

Most digital cameras have a baffle to prevent infrared light reaching the sensor, as it causes noise. Because of this baffle, exposure times with a typical SLR and an infrared filter start at 5 seconds and only go up. The problem here is that you're basically allowing in noise-causing light for long periods of time, so that no matter what ISO you choose, you'll get a noisy photo. This makes it hard to really push a badly-exposed photo. It's very close to taking a photo in the dark at ISO 3200 and then pushing it up a stop. It'll look horrible.

To get to the point of all this, you need a strong foreground interest for the photo, as everything in the distance is going to be...fuzzy. The foreground too if it's windy (long exposure), but it's not as noticeable.

One effective thing to do is place your interest at some point short of where the lens focuses to infinity (ie, very close), focus on that and then open your aperature up. It'll give a nicely soft background to the subject.

Light:

You don't need a bright and shiny day to make the most of infrared. In fact, a cloudy day can make for some very broody and dramatic photos as you'll have a nice dark sky above.

Paitence:

This should really go without saying. You need to set your camera, fiddle with filters and then wait for anything up to a minute to see if you got anything worthwhile. Cover your bases – once you've settled on an exposure your like, go and take more at different exposures. You'll never know which photo you'll pick out and use.

mikeanywhere

Good info there Mark,

Is the tutorial still in the pipeline??

Fenster

Part 2, processing the bloody thing:

So you want to turn this:



...into this:



...do you?

It takes a several steps, involving both Photoshop and Lightroom. For ease of following, I've uploaded the actual raw file to here. I hereby release it under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (by-nc) license.

I apologise for the lack of screenshots to follow, but it's late, my head hurts and I'm tired. I'll put them up at some point, but for now just open up the photo and follow along as you will.

To sum it up, I begin in Lightroom, move to Photoshop and then back into Lightroom for finishing work.

First step is a white balance adjustment in Lightroom. In the case of this photo, it was an excellent exposure, so I just adjust white balance to 2850 with 0 adjustment to tint.

Export the photo to Photoshop, auto-adjust levels and then reverse the colour channels. Next, I applied my bleach bypass action. I've toned it down since last posting it; in that I've reduced contrast via levels and added a blue cast with a photo filter.

After that, create a new layer, change it's blending to soft light and fill it with black with the bucket tool. Voila, blue and contrasted infrared image. From here on it's fine tweaking. I dodged around the tree truck and foliage to recover it a little and cloned out small pieces of crap around the base of the tree.

At this point, go to the top of the stack of layers and add a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Tweak down magentas by about 50% (going the full way just turns their area into black and white, leaving very flat image).

I then save the image and return to Lightroom. Here I use the split tone function as follows:

Shadow Hue 234
Shadow Saturation 33

This gives dark blue shadowed areas. I then tweak the balance up by +45 and finally a 41-point highlight recovery to take out some glare.

And that's it.

Monasette

Great tutorial, Mark.

Regarding the White Balance, have you tried using the Custom White Balance (CWB) function ? I find that it gives a very neutral image with which to to start processing.

I shoot landscapes so I usually take a test shot of grass with the IR filter on. (closest thing to 18% grey). Using the CWB function (in the Menu options on most Canon DSLRs), I select the grass image and set the White Balance to CWB. Each subsequent shot uses the IR image of the grass as the reference shot, and the resulting images look almost b &w to begin with (i.e. no magenta tint to remove).

I was shooting IR over the weekend - I'll post an example here at the weekend as an example. I did a post about this a while back, with a few examples, at http://www.monasette.com/archive/000893.html - hope it helps.

Fenster

It all really depends on what exactly you want out of the image - you like a fine black and white, I (currently) prefer to flip the colour channels and pump contrast; and John Beardsworth who you mentioned on your site chooses to colourise his photos.

Fenster

I tried out the CWB function briefly today and it worked wonderfully, thank'ee for the tip:

trishw78

MASSIVE BUMP

Hi Mark I was wondering if you could do another one of these. I clicked on some of the links but they're well gone at this stage.

thank you

EDIT: Tis a pity i didn't do the search for this earlier in the day when I was going out to Tramore