Thanks for visiting smudgeonmylens.com. This is a tutorial on Nikon D70 IR Photography. I apologize in advance, as it was thrown together with some haste.


Equipment Used
While the picture was taken with the Nikon D70, this is mainly a Photoshop tutorial on turning your RAW image obtained by your camera into an actual viewable photo. Here is the equipment I'm using, start to finish on the development of this photo:

-- Nikon D70 -- An excellent camera, and most likely the reason you're visiting my site. :)
-- Hoya 67mm R72 Infrared Filter -- From my understanding, this is somewhat of a beginner level of IR filter... .
-- Quantaray - QSX Ultra Pro -- Excellent tripod. A tripod of somesort will be required for this type of IR photography.
-- Adobe PhotoShop CS -- Adobe keeps cranking out more an more hits in its Photoshop series. A must have for the photographer.

Below are the start and finish pictures of the tutorial. . You can click on the left image for a larger version of the picture to work along with the tutorial if you like. If you have any questions with this tutorial, feel free to contact me at smudge[at]smudgeonmylens.com.

Preface - Shooting the Photo

In shooting this photo, I just went down to the local train tracks, snapped off some color shots of the track, and then screwed on the filter, and then shot some IR of the area. Its important to note that while shooting with this filter on, you cannot see out of your viewfinder (all you see is black (which in reality, is dark red)). However, you can easily pick your target, focus the camera, screw the filter on, and then snap the shot. It might be slightly more overhead to swap filters, but for those of us not camera repairmen, it's the obvious alternative. This was a bright sunny day so my shutter speed was not as low as it would typically be. Here are the settings I used on this photo:

Quality: JPEG
Shutter Speed: 1/15 second
Focal Length: 38mm
F-Stop: f/4.2
ISO: 400

Once you take your shot, you'll have a nice reddish/black image like the one above. If you can't see your image in the LCD after you've taken the picture, your photo is underexposed. Either open the aperature, increase the ISO, or lower your shutterspeed.

Step 1
Well the image, as is, looks like crap. So open it up in Photoshop and start in. Select the "Background" layer in the "Layers" palette and press Control-J to duplicate this layer. I always duplicate my original layer so that I am never saving permanently to my main image.

Step 2
Once that is done, in the layers palette, select this new layer by clicking it. Now we're going to convert the image to something we can show people. Select your channel mixer by going to Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer (see screenshot for help). Once the Channel Mixer comes up, there will be a little checkbox in the lower lefthand corner of the pop up window marker "Monochrome". Select that. Now configure your setting for the color channels to your preference. For this example, I used the following settings:

Red Channel: 116%
Blue Channel: 100%
Green Channel: 80%
Constant: -20%.

Of course, these are tailored by you to your taste. Personally, I like my IR photos with deep areas of black and my flora regions almost bleeched white. Obviously, my tastes don't suite everyone, so play with these until you discover a pattern in how you like your image to look. Here was my end result.

Step 3
Experimentation. It takes awhile to figure out how to customize to your liking. Not every image, no matter how much you play with the channels ends up looking like a decent photo. Here are some examples of some other IR photos I've taken:

Nikon D70 Digital IR Gallery

Summary
There are a number of ways to do IR.. this is just one of many. If anyone else has done a tutorial on this, or any other photography method, and would like to share, I would be happy to post this on my site. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me at smudge[at]smudgeonmylens.com