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04/10/2009 01:18:43 PM · #1 |
Got a Cokin IR filter yesterday, took it out and played around. I've read some tutorials, so I thought I had an idea what I was doing. I shot in RAW; I set a custom white balance in the camera (based on grass), did a bunch of shots, and everything looked good on the camera screen.
When I downloaded to the computer and opened in Bridge, all the thumbnails went from the way they looked on screen (that lovely IR black & white) to glaring red, which is also how they opened in ACR and CS3.
When I looked into this, I read that the camera displays the JPEG of a photo, with processing applied, blah blah blah, and because I shot in RAW none of this is carried over, which is why Bridge and the other software revert to the ugly red version.
I understand that the camera doesn't apply settings to RAW files - that's why they're RAW. But shouldn't it carry over a custom white balance setting in the sidecar file? If not, then what the heck is the point of doing custom WB? I've done custom WBs in the past and they always seemed to carry over (I thought). Do they ever? Or is my application with the IR just more than it can handle?
Edit: I just saw that this is in the wrong place; I've asked SC to move it
Message edited by author 2009-04-10 13:20:02.
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04/10/2009 01:51:56 PM · #2 |
| ACR provides an "as shot" white balance choice, so I would think that it would include your custom white balance? |
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04/10/2009 02:02:45 PM · #3 |
Originally posted by fldave:
ACR provides an "as shot" white balance choice, so I would think that it would include your custom white balance? |
I'd have thought so too. But when I select "As Shot," I still end up with a very red image. Same story when I select "Custom WB" in ACR. Neither seems to pick up on the actual custom setting.
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04/10/2009 02:18:37 PM · #4 |
Did you have the camera set to RAW + jpeg? Perhaps the camera/jpeg file was set to a B/W filter? I can shoot B/W with my Fuji and IR shots look great, but even with custom WB, my shots come our red with both my K10D and Fuji.
You can still use the channel mixer in CS3 onward (I am told, as I use PSE7) to find more pleasing tones. |
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04/22/2009 08:08:42 PM · #5 |
I never tried IR before, but I've read that the shots should be red because your IR filter doesn't allow the visible light to come through it. And B&W is just the post processing thing. I think so.. Anyway, you can read those articles here about IR post processing and here about shooting technique
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04/22/2009 08:16:09 PM · #6 |
You are running afoul of the fact that ACR does not understand the camera-specific settings for the white balance. This is the fault of the camera manufacturers, who keep that information proprietary. Canon, for instance, would like you to use their software, which of course natively and correctly interprets the white balance information.
What you *can* do is to manually adjust one image to get the result you want, then copy the settings and paste to the remainder of the images in the set. |
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04/22/2009 08:21:38 PM · #7 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
You are running afoul of the fact that ACR does not understand the camera-specific settings for the white balance. This is the fault of the camera manufacturers, who keep that information proprietary. Canon, for instance, would like you to use their software, which of course natively and correctly interprets the white balance information.
What you *can* do is to manually adjust one image to get the result you want, then copy the settings and paste to the remainder of the images in the set. |
I wondered about this. Thanks,  kirbic. Naturally, I hate Canon's DPP software. But I suppose my only other choice is to just shoot JPEG. The last batch I did, I manually converted the images, but they didn't look quite right. I'll have to keep playing.
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04/22/2009 11:45:55 PM · #8 |
I'm sorry, this whole thread is not making much sense to me. The point of setting a white balance is to get the colors in an image to look natural. The point of shooting IR is to mess up the color relationships and to take you into a completely different domain of brightness relationships.
The IR filter blocks visible light. Normal film is not sensitive to IR; IR film is especially made to be sensitive to IR. But it is not a color film--what you get is a gray-scale image where the tone depends on the amount of IR light. Leaves appear white because they give off a lot of IR light. The sky is black because it doesn't give off much IR.
Your camera is inherently color. There are three sets of sensors for Red, Green, and Blue, but only the Red sensors are sensitive to IR. Thus when you look at the image, what you see is red because there is no green or blue. Your first step in post-processing should be to convert the image to gray-scale, preferably by selecting only the red channel. Then you will see an image with the classic "IR look." No amount of white-balance adjustments will achieve this.
This is not the whole story. There is something called "color infrared" that produces color images with some of the characteristics of gray-scale IR. I'm usually not impressed with these images; they seem to be unpleasantly unnatural to me. They can't really be infrared because infrared is beyond color.
~~DanW |
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