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Showing results for tags 'eir'.
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OK, so I was shipped a 39mm Leitz IR filter (deep red, almost black) by mistake for a Leica UV/IR filter - and decided to keep it. Playing around, the first thing I noticed is that while the M8 replicates B&W infrared film quite nicely, color IR shots are nothing like color Ektachrome Infrared. They are either red all over, or, with a strong bias of the white balance towards the left (yellow, + green tint), a weak approximation of EIR shot without a filter - pastel purples, magentas and reds. Where were all the rich greens and cyans and flaming red foliage I remembered from shooting film EIR? You know, the colors the CIA would analyse to figure out the Soviet crop forecast, and so on. I've now figured out how to get those colors back - and it basically involves replicating how Kodak sensitized the three layers of EIR. What Kodak did was to mismatch the wavelength sensitivities of the layers to their color dyes, so that infrared light created a red image (cyan dye layer), red light created a green image (magenta dye layer), and green light created a blue image (yellow dye layer). Blue light affected all the layers, and created that purple look if no filter was used, so the normal way to shoot EIR was with either a yellow or a normal red filter (not IR-only) to block all blue light. So - what I've done is to shoot TWO exposures of these scenes - one with the Leitz IR-only filter, and one in "normal" RGB. I open the normal color shot in photoshop, and swap some color channels. Green channel gets copy/pasted into the blue channel, red channel gets copy/pasted into the green channel. Then I open the IR exposure, and copy THAT red channel and paste it to the red channel of the "normal" color image. So I've now got Infrared>red, red>green, green>blue. This replicates the look of EIR shot with a yellow filter - firey red grass and trees, cyan skies, and some neutral tones that look almost color-correct. For the look of EIR shot with a red filter (which produced IR and red images but no green exposure) I just take the additional step of filling the blue channel with black (no exposure). This gives the same intense red/yellow/green pallette. It takes a bit of further processing with "selective color" and "HSB" to get the colors precise, but that is pretty easy once the basic palette is in place. I figured this was M8-specific, even if it is a post-processing technique. Unless you do surgery on a DMR or D-Lux 4 to take out the IR filters, it doesn't apply to them. ------ P.S. You'll notice the clouds moved between the IR and normal color exposures, thus the cyan/red/white effect. I also shot this first set of pix hand-held, but it really requires a tripod for the two exposures to match - amazing how a fraction of an inche can change how things align even at 50-60 feet away!