Digital Infra-Red Techniques

[John]

In repsonse to a request to explain the technique that I use to produce "pseudo-IR" shots in Photoshop. First, the picture that generated the request:

015 Rufford Old Hall IR 800px.jpg (350.6 KiB) Viewed 2212 times

The image must have some IR light to start with, so that depends on the day (sunlight is best) and also on the camera not filtering out too much IR. Some cameras are better than others in this respect.
1. Open the image in Photoshop
2. Do initial levels/curves if desired
3. Open Channel Mixer and click "monochrome"
4. Reduce the blue channel even as far as zero
5. Increase red and green channels to the max if necessary, bringing them back to control contrast and prevent clipping
6. Resize as required
7. Sharpen using Unsharp Mask
8. Add Noise by using filter Noise>Add Noise>Gaussian Monochromatic (this is done after sharpening)
Notice the noise is added last, because if you try and sharpen the noise it makes a horrible mess of things. Hope that's of interest!