articles/Infrared/digitalinfrared-page5

Digital Infrared - part 5 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/04/2012

A sharpening ring around allowed us to explore the effects of different ACR pre-sharpening and Photoshop High Pass sharpening.

Despite this it would be remiss to conclude without at least some starting advice from which to springboard your own experiments. Here then is a possible workflow:
1. Shoot in manual mode in-camera, using RAW files and centring the exposure about 3/4 to the right but ensuring that there are no 'highlights flashing' in-camera.
2. Process in ACR using the Exposure and Blacks sliders to achieve sufficient 'punch' to the image, again ensuring that no clipping is occurring. Use 16-bit output.
3. Convert to Grayscale in ACR (before #2 if you prefer).
4. Apply sharpening of Amount 40, Radius 0.5, Detail of 80 and Masking to taste (looking to protect blank skies). This applies to 3,000 x 2,000 pixel images (in a Nikon D70 to be exact).
5. Open the image into Photoshop, then use multiple adjustment layers and masks to 'bend' the image creatively to taste. Four were used in the example shown.
6. Sharpen using a High Pass method and about 0.8-2.0 pixels radius. Then back off the opacity of the high pass layer probably to between 20% and 40%.

The manipulated image includes Adjustment Layers with soft-edged Layer Masks, S-Shaped curves and a final High Pass sharpening layer.

Now carefully check over the image and even if it looks OK on screen, make a test print. If it looks poor on screen it will almost certainly look awful in a print!

Overall then, the two days provided an excellent insight into IR photography. The rather mixed weather taught us a few things. IR can create images from visually unpromising material and you can continue to shoot even when the light in the visible spectrum would cause you to turn for home.

• Digital Infrared page 1
  
• Digital Infrared page 2
  
• Digital Infrared page 3
  
• Digital Infrared page 4
  
• Digital Infrared page 5
  
• Digital Infrared page 6
  

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