Slave To Photography II
OK. So, I’ll explain the technique I used to take infrared photos with my mobile phone camera.
First, you need to check and see if your camera is sensitive to Infrared light. An easy way to check this is to point a remote control at your camera and press one of the buttons. If you see a light, your phone is sensitive to IR (to test whether or SLR is IR-sensitive you will have to take a photo).
Then, like Jasmine mentioned in the comments in my previous post you need to get two bits of exposed and developed film. Look through your old negatives for completely black bits. If you can’t find any do what I did and go to your local Snappy Snaps, buy a 24 exposure roll of 35mm film, pull it out of the cannister, the wind it back in, hand it over to the mildly bemused person behind the counter and ask for it to be developed, but not printed.
You then cover up the lens with *two* bits of black negative. This blocks out pretty much all visible light yet will let through infrared light. When you take a photo it will come out fairly red.
You need to open this in Photoshop (or some other photo software, but really why do you use anything other than Photoshop?) and simply auto adjust the levels.
Then go into the channel mixer and swap the red and blue channels- ie in the red channel make ‘red’ 0% and ‘blue’ 100%, in the blue channel make ‘blue’ 0% and ‘red’ 100%.
Then, if you want to intensify the colours, duplicate the layers and in your ‘layers’ window go to the dropdown menu which reads ‘Normal’ and change it to ‘Multiply’.
You can then go into Image>Adjustments>Levels and under the top window take the righthand triangle (the white one) and drag it left to a point at which you think the photo looks best. Et voila! An amazing-looking infrared photo from your mobile phone!
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2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Jas
I use the Gimp for this, because it is free and I don’t do enough photo manipulation to be worth paying the huge number of monies Adobe wants for Photoshop. :(
Apr 22nd, 2007
giagia
Ah Gimp :)… I used Gimp before I got Photoshop. I use Photoshop daily so I really do need an all-singing and dancing app, but if I didn’t Gimp would be the one to use.
Apr 23rd, 2007
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