Critique Welcomed IR Butterfly

[Keith Hollister]

Getting the hang of the false color IR processing (day 2). Was exploring the property and got lucky with the butterfly. It was windy and I had to rely on the AF of the Olympus being able to focus and capture this before the wind moved the branch too much. Just in case someone doesn't realize, this is a LOT of processing in PS and LR. False color is not as easy as the youtube tutorials make it look.

I think I overdid the vignette bit, so this probably needs a makeover.

IR Butterfly by Keith Hollister, on Flickr

 

[John Allen]

Beautiful. I think I lack the knowledge and experience necessary to fully appreciate IR photography. ,

 

[Keith Hollister]

Thanks, John. It's supposed to be art - you don't have to understand it

 

[Ivar Dahl-Larsen]

Oh sh.. that's where I've gone wrong all this time well whatever it is I trust you and I like it But you have a road to travel yet.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Interesting, Keith. Not sure I like it as much as the others, but good to see.

 

[John Holland]

Very nice, Keith. I'll have to look into the false coloring processing.

 

[Aaron J. Heiner]

For the color IR, are the channels inverted, then require switching them around, prior to post. I have one IR BW camera now and am considering converting another over to color IR, but haven't seen many in he wild yet

 

[Keith Hollister]

For the color IR, are the channels inverted, then require switching them around, prior to post. I have one IR BW camera now and am considering converting another over to color IR, but haven't seen many in he wild yet

I think there was a question in there

Yes, for the so-called false color IR, you take the image with a camera with a higher frequency cutoff (590nm in my case) and then post process (usually quite a bit) to get whatever surrealistic look you think works. Folks usually start with swapping the red and blue channels using a Channel Mixer layer in PS. If you white balanced the image correctly (another whole can of worms with color IR), you nominally get blue skies and yellow or orange foliage. Color IR is definitely not for the SOOC crowd. For SOOC B&W IR, you would want a long wave filter down around 800nm or longer. That gives the classic B&W IR look with minimal screwing around.

This thing is great fun with a huge range of creative possibilities. But there really isn't much of a cookbook on how to use them.

 

[Pete Askew]

Interesting stuff again, Keith (and you answered my question too!).