Infrared Gear Starting to crack the infrared code?

[bilzmale]

I have visited IR photography many times over the years and have previously owned two converted cameras (Oly E500 and Canon G9) prior to picking up a Pana GF1 this month with a broad spectrum conversion ( sees UV + Visible + IR). The advantage of this is by changing the external filters you can take a range of photo types.

I've never been really happy with my results until this weekend. None of the RAW converters I tried managed the white balance correctly with a lower limit of 2000K which is still very blue. The standard red/blue channel swap did not give me what I saw others achieving and I noticed all the tutorials I pored over, used Photoshop. I actually went as far as downloading the latest CC but even that didn't give me what I was after. While logged in to Adobe I noticed there was my old version of CS6 waiting to be downloaded with the serial number so I installed that. I hadn't spent any money but it still wasn't 'working' for me.

Then I hit google pay-dirt. The Kelvin temp of IR light is closer to zero and the only way to get the white balance this low is to convert a RAW unprocessed file to DNG and create a custom profile in the free DNG Profile Editor. With this installed in ACR I was getting the red/blue channel swaps I was seeking. I also created a profile for broad-spectrum photos.

Yes, this is getting long-winded so I'll share some photos. The first 5 are taken with an IR filter and the last with no filter.

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[BrianS]

I converted a Nikon Coolpix 950 to full-spectrum years ago, since gave it away to a student. As it was full-spectrum, I tended to use various filters to Block one visible band, leaving that channel sensitive to IR only. These are taken using a Magenta Filter to block green. Blue channel is not swapped. Infrared Ektachrome tended to show Chlorophyll as Red. I remember using "auto-levels" in Photoshop 7 for these.

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[bilzmale]

Yes Brian, I discovered the Auto Levels tweak in ACR and used it on these shots. All were further tweaked in On1 as I still prefer it to PS.