Hi I'm Doug McKinlay and you're watching AdoramaTV. For today's video we're going
to be something really cool. We're going to convert a color picture to color
infrared.
Let me just say from the outset that what we're doing here is mimicking what a color
infrared picture should look like. The process, using computer software plug-in,
approximates how these pictures will look.
Yes, we can do some stuff in camera but we're going to do it on the computer today.
The process is quite easy, allows for a lot of interpretation of how your final
picture should look. To achieve a software built color infrared picture,
I'll be using the infrared filter and Nik software Color Efex Pro 4.
I have my tethered to photoshop but it can also be launched in Lightroom or in
Aperture, if you happen to be still running that program. So here we are.
We've got the Nik software Color Efex Pro 4 interface up with our image
that we've chosen. This one is very green. Images with a lot of foliage tend to
work better for infrared imagery. Now, what we're going to do first is we
are going to cheat a little bit so the first filter that I'm going to add to
this picture is going to be the Indian summer filter. I'm going to go really
light on this, so at the moment it's at 50%. If you look to the right hand
side of the interface you'll see the enhanced foliage slider. We're just going
to drag that back down a bit.
The reason why I do is it tends to just add that little extra punch to your
infrared color images. Now we can have a quick look at the compare button at the top,
before and after.
It's not a huge amount of difference just a little bit of nuance there. Now on
the right hand side on the control panel, you want to just click add filter and our
next step in this process is to grab the infrared film. Now you'll see on the
right-hand side of this filter that you've got four little boxes there. It's
going to give you choices.
There's two choices the top, two black-and-white choices which we will
ignore and then there's a few choices below
for color. So I think we're going to choose number five. It's not quite so
heavy as the other choices. You can already see, it's starting to really punch
out. It's going to look really different, really ethereal. Now, what we have to
watch for is clipping. So we're going down to the loop and histograms and
we're going to click on the shadow box and it tells us... it tells us how our
shadows are and we'll just drag that up a little bit, take some of the shadow out, not too
much. Again, we'll go look at that. We'll look at the highlights, click on the highlights box
and you can really see the green is where everything looks a bit blown out
so we'll grab the slider and the highlights controller and just
drag that to the right, just drag that to the right and you can start to see it
disappear.
That white water is really, really blown out so we're almost done, we'll leave it at that.
OK, we're almost finished with this. It's a really quick process, but I'm going to
add one last filter, so add filter. Go back to our filter choices and we are
going to grab glamour glow. This just helps to add a little bit of that to
that ethereal look. Again you can click on the choice box on the right-hand side,
you'll see a whole bunch of different sort of styles so we're going to grab
subtle glow because we don't go crazy with it. Now if you already he want to see how
it looks before and after you add the filter, just click on this little
tick mark here. It'll turn it off.
Off and on, and you can see that. Now, for infrared I think that adds a little bit
extra to it. Now, once you're happy with that you can
also look at your compare box at the top before and after or a side-by-side or
split or full frame.
So that looks pretty good. I'm quite happy with that so I'm going to click OK to export
it out to Photoshop. Now, just to point here, this is a fairly small jpg file,
just for expediency sake the large full-frame files that come from a Canon 5D III
are about 60 megabytes, so it would take forever for them to work
through the computer. Now, see we've got a slight problem there, so let's go into our
masks or sorry, our layers and we'll just check this.
Let's just turn that one off, we'll get rid of that extra one there.
So there you have it. That is the finished color infrared image used in
Nik software's Color Efex Pro 4. So that's it for me. I'm Doug McKinlay and
thanks for watching AdoramaTV. Now, don't forget you can subscribe to AdoramaTV for more
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