Digital Infrared Photography
How do I know if my camera is a digital infrared camera?
Digital infrared cameras – how can you tell if your camera is able to do digital infrared photography? Well, if you have a digital point & shoot camera – with an LCD viewing screen that you compose your shot in, there’s a super easy way to tell – more or less.
To find out if you have a digital infrared camera, try this quick test:
Hunt down a TV, VCR or DVD player remote control. Look at the end that points to the TV (or VCR etc), and you’ll see a little bulb or flat back plastic. This is the transmitter that sends the signal from the remote to your device. And, guess what? The signal (usually) uses infrared waves!
“OK, so what does all this have to do with my camera,” you ask?! Ok, I’ll get to the point!
Turn on your camera, and point the remote at it and look at it through your LCD screen. If you see your remote sensor light up with a white light, while looking through your camera LCD, there’s a very good chance that you camera will take infrared photos.
See what I mean?
If you have a digital SLR camera, like the Nikon D70, D50, D200 etc. you will have to perform the same test, but you have to take an acutal photo of the remote control since these cameras do not have an LCD preview panel.
From my research, the Nikon D70 seems to be the best bet for a digital SLR since the newer models have even more IR blocking technology. Some point & shoot cameras are fine too but the overal quality of th eimages will be less, adn if you want to enlarge any of your art, you won’t be bale to make reprints larger than about 8×12.
As for Canon cameras, I have not done any detailed hands-on research, but at one of our workshops Canon shooters generally found their cameras were not as sensitive to IR as the Nikons were.
A Few Critical Supplies
Have you checked to make sure your digital camera is able to take infrared photos? Excellent!
But before you can begin to click away, you’ll need some additional digital infrared photography equipment. Depending on your camera, you may need a few extras too.
The main accessories for digital infrared photography are a TRIPOD, and an INFRARED FILTER, that will block visible light but let the invisible infrared light pass through to the camera’s sensor.
The tripod is almost always a requirement to stabilize your camera, because the filter is so dense that your exposure will be very long – and camera shake will knock your images out of focus. When you look through an infrared filter, it is just about black, and you can barely see anything except the brightest objects (like the sun!) through it.
If you have a point & shoot digital camera, you will probably need an ADAPTER TUBE and a STEP UP RING to allow the filter to fit onto your camera.
Your set-up would look something like this:
The adapter tubes and rings aren’t too expensive. For my Olympus the tube was about $35.00 and the ring was about $15.00.The filters are more expensive, ranging from $50.00 to a high of $135.00. If you shop on the Internet, I’ll be posting the best place I have found for filters of all kinds, as well as adapter rings and tubes, here in the next few weeks.
Infrared Exposure Techniques
Digital Infrared Photography with the Nikon D70 is pretty straight forward when you take advantege of the power of its custom settings. Here I’ll show you what camera settings I use for my digital infrared photos using the D70.
Digital Infrared photography with the Nikon D70
Assuming you have your tripod (pretty well a MUST for perfect infrared shots), and the infrared filter of your choice (best to use an Wratten 89B or equivalent, such as a Hoya R72), you can create custom settings in your D70 to maximize its infrared potential.
Taking the time to do this upfront will help eliminate some of the uncertainties of digital infrared photography, which can result in only an ok photo, rather than a WOW! photo.
As always with these kinds of things, there is no one right way to achieve results. But these steps are the ones that I have had the most success with, using my D70 so far.
- Image Type
- ISO
- White Balance
- Color Space
- Sharpening
- Bracketing Exposure
Image Type
I know many people will disagree with me on this, but I really prefer to shoot RAW for digital infrared. Nikon’s NEF format is so versatile, and if for some reason you are in a spontaneous kind of photographic situation, and haven’t saved your settings, or don’t have time to adjust them, you can still get a really fine infrared image – with a little help from Photoshop, or other image editing program that supports the NEF format – if you’re using RAW.
ISO
You can play with increasing the ISO, but I’ve had the best results when I leave it at 200. Otherwise the noise is too great – for my taste, anyway. I do a fair amount of post processing in Photo shop after exposure, so noise is going to be a problem, if it is magnified.
And unlike infrared film, where the graininess is part of the ethereal quality of the photography, digital infrared “grain” or noise really degrades your image. If you want to add the look of grainy film, do it in Photoshop, or other image-editing program. We’ll see how a little later.
White Balance
In my experience, setting a custom white balance is a key to GOOD Digital Infrared Photography with the Nikon d70. Because you are using a filter that blocks most “regular” light, the camera’s internal white balancing mechanism cannot provide you with an accurate measurement of the colour temperature of your environment. Since foliage reflects IR light, making it the brightest, whitest part of your photo, you’ll need to “calibrate” your D70 to let it know that visible light green is equal to infrared white.
There are a couple of ways to do this. Again the D70 is a very versatile little creature, so try a few and see which works best for the kind of photos you are taking.
NUMBER 1: The simplest white balance methodusing the D70 is to open your menu, use the control button to flip down to the white balance setting, and change it to fluorescent +3. Since for infrared photography you’ll be most likely shooting in bright sunlight with a “red” filter, adding some false color correction in the camera, seems to give your final IR images more “punch.” Others have found the incandescent setting works too.
NUMBER 2: Another way to adjust white balance for digital infrared photography with the Nikon D70 is to take a photo of green grass at midday in full sun. Just the grass – no feet, no trees, no sky. Just point your camera at the grass looking straight down, and click! Now, in your menu, you’ll set the white balance from this photo. So, go to your menu, select white balance, >preset> use photo>select image> use your control dial to navigate to the image of the grass (hopefully it is the only one on your card to make it easy). Your menu should now say “this image>set.” Now you’re ready to shoot infrared!
NUMBER 3: The last way but in my opinion, the best way to adjust your white balance is to do it manually, using the “preset” function. The Nikon user guide has some information about doing this, but here are the basics.
1) rather than using a standard 18% gray card to calibrate your white balance, use a patch of green grass in full sunlight. Set up as if you were taking a photo of the grass, looking straight down (at your feet, but without your feet in the shot).
2) select “measure” in the preset menu, or press the WB button and rotate your main command dial (the one on the back) until PRE is displayed in your control panel. Its pretty tiny so look hard!
3) release the WB button, and then press it again until the BIG PRE icon in the control panel starts to flash.
4) frame the grass so it fills the viewfinder and press the shutter release all the way down. Your camera will now measure the value for the white balance and use this value when the preset white balance is selected.
5) if the camera was successful, GOOD will flash in the control panel. To return to shooting mode, just press the shutter halfway down.
Color space
I use the Adobe RGB color space for a greater range of colors. To set up the D70 for Adobe RGB, go to the menu, and choose Optimize images>Custom>Color mode> II Adobe RGB.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t use Adobe products for your image processing or editing, it is an industry standard, so you’ll still get full versatility from this color space.
Bracketing your Exposure
Setting up your D70 to bracket shots is easy. While you can make adjustments to the EV for each bracketed shot, most of the time I find that the default works well for infrared photos.
All you have to do is select the BKT button on the back of the camera, and use the Main Command Dial to flip to bracket mode. Check in the control panel to make sure bracketing is set.
Post production enahncement techniques using Photoshop
PRESET COLOR BALANCE
If you just leave the camera white balance on sunny or use auto white balance you will find your images are predominantly red and look something like the bellow image:
What I like to do is create a custom preset white balance by taking a picture of grass, this way grass and most other foliage will look much more neutral and the red cast is more tolerable. Make sure to just have green grass covering the entire viewfinder. If the camera said the image is no good keep adjusting the compensation dial until it likes the image for the preset, I found on the D70 a compensation of -2 to -3 stops works fine.
You should end up with pictures that look like this one bellow:
CORRECTING FLAT IMAGES
It is quite common with infrared digital photography to end up with an image that is quite flat and low in contrast and tonal range, like the example bellow:
As you can see it is quite flat, but you can fix it in Photoshop by stretching the tonal range by going to Image – Adjustments – Levels. The histogram may look something like this:
Drag the left arrow (black) to the right until it just touches the point were the curve starts and drag the right arrow (white) to the left to the point were the curve starts. Here is a screen grab of what you should have done:
What you have done is stretch the compressed tonal range to the full range of pure black and pure white, giving you a much more contrast and “pop” to the image. The resulting image:
If you want more contrast you could drag the black and white points in the Levels dialog more inward, clipping some of the information and even further increasing the contrast. At this point if you would rather have a black and white image simply go to Image – Adjustments – Desaturate. But if you are interested in color infrared images then read on.
INVERTING CHANNELS TO CREATE A BLUE SKY
Using Photoshop we can swap the red and blue channels to change the red sky for a blue one. Here is our image:
With the image open select Image – Adjustments – Channel Mixer. With the channel mixer open select Red as the output channel and drag the Red channel slider until 0% is displayed. Then drag the Blue channel slider until 100% is displayed. Here is the screen grab:
Now select Blue as the output channel and drag the blue channel slider until 0% is displayed. Then drag the Red channel slider until 100% is displayed, Here is the screen grab:
Click ok and now you should have a blue sky. You can further tweak the color and saturation of the image by going to Image – Adjustments – Hue/Saturation. The image should look like this:
CORRECTING CLIPPED HIGHLIGHTS
On occasion you may run into an image that has strange looking cyan highlights, like the bellow example:
You can correct this in Photoshop by going to Image – Adjustments – Hue/Saturation.
In the Edit menu select Cyan as the color to work on. Your cursor will change to the color picker tool, find a patch of this cyan highlight in your image and click on it with your picker tool. Now drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left, making the cyan cast gray. The cast is gone but our highlights are now a muddy gray, to make the highlights normal highlights just drag the Lightness slider all the way to the right. Here is how the controls should look like:
The image should look like this:
Hope this tutorial was helpful in getting the most out of your digital infrared photography.
