False Color Processing
Since I find some time on my hands waiting for a storm front to arrive for me to photograph, here's a fairly topical work. Been experimenting on Near IR and especially false color photography fairly frantically recently since discovering that on the contrary to my first impressions and to what I've been told my EOS 450D is equally capable of IR photography to my old (nowadays dead) EOS 300D. Actually despite of lower sensitivity (1-2 stops) the fact that with it I can quite safely use ISO 400 without too much worry about noise and the level of detail it's capable of producing being quite drastically higher, in real life it's actually far superior to the 300D, which I considered only slightly frustrating tool.
Made a few very pleasant discoveries about it too. With my 50mm F/1.8 LiveView autofocus works like a dream and to my great surprise exposure metering in LiveView works great as well.
So let this serve as a word of encouragement for those interested in the field. EOS 450D is considered one of the least sensitive cameras in the market today but it's still fairly usable as long as you remember to bring a stand.
Enough blabbering. First of all let's start with a few words about taking the photos. The optimal conditions for IR photography are somewhat different to any other form of photography. By far the best is a sunny day around noon. One other observation that I've made is that it actually seems to pay off setting the white balance manually on the camera even if shooting RAW. This should by any means be a non issue but for some reason, in Canon cameras you get a wider spectral range if you do. If you're shooting JPEG this is really a must. Setting it is fairly simple. Just use in the lighting conditions you'll be working a patch of grass or leaves of a tree for a white balance reference. Canon cameras don't have wide enough range for white balance setting even lower value than 2000K would be needed but what can you do.
As for processing once you know what to do it's actually fairly simple. In Photoshop the basic procedure is following:
1. Channel Mixer
Select red channel -> Set source channel red to 0% and set blue to 100% -> Select blue channel -> The same in vice versa red to 100% and blue to 0%
In effect you'll be swapping blue and red channels with each other.
If you're insanely lucky that might do it. If not...
2. Levels
Levels tool has a gray point picker now this is more trial and error than anything else. If you want the greenery to have a warm hue you might want to find some blue spot with relatively low saturation. This will decrease the saturation of the blue areas a bit and most probably give a yellowish tint to the foliage.
3. Hue/Saturation
Trial and error stuff once again. Try out different master hue points. You might want to adjust the master hue according to the foliage. If the sky gets an undesired color you can adjust hue and saturation of the component colors individually.
Now here's something for you to play around with.
I can share the exports of my other IR works as well if you want to fool around with them more before running off to the shops to buy filters.
Original RAW, adjusted and exported to DNG.
http://escimobsbbs.pp.fi/misc/PostPr...FalseColor.dng 13MB
Final PSD:
http://escimobsbbs.pp.fi/misc/PostPr...FalseColor.psd 17MB
Preview uploaded to the group gallery.