Exploring the Infrared World

For the past few days I’ve been working the infrared with a vengeance. Working with both the Nikon D50 and D90, I've been able to develop an image capture and post-processing workflow to accommodate the advantages and disadvantages of both.

JPEGs shot with the D50 have a pleasing aesthetic all by themselves that requires little or no processing, unless creative, false-color images are the goal. Ironically, its raw images are harder to work with due to an Adobe Camera Raw white balance issue, which is easily overcome by using Apple Aperture 3.

For D50 JPEGs and monochrome images, ACR and Aperture work quite well. But for D90 images and some D50 raw images industrial strength L*a*b* processing is needed. And channel swapping in RGB is no slouch either. So I now have two actions, one for RGB and one for L*a*b* which set up every viable adjustment so that all I
have to do is click and slide to tweak. They keep the camera raw image as a Smart Object layer, so it can be edited non-destructively. ACR’s noise reduction alone is instrumental in cleaning up the detritus from the enormous color moves possible in L*a*b*.

So now it's time to go out and do some shooting!