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There is no single correct method for creating this effect. The blue-sky effect works well when you want to have an image that combines realistic elements with surreal ones. Image adjusted in Capture NX2.Īt the end of the day, you can find lots of ways to be creative with your infrared images. In Capture NX2, the LCH editor can be used to perform a 180° hue shift. Set the Hue range to 180° and then drag the slider (triangle) up or down to get the effect. Then, choose “Hue” from the drop-down menu in the LCH Editor window.
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To perform the hue adjustment, you’ll need to add a LCH Editor Adjustment Step. You can also use Capture NX2 on TIFF/JPEG images exported from Lightroom or Aperture if you wish. If you shoot with a Nikon camera and capture NEF images, you can use Capture NX2 directly on your RAW files. Viveza 2 can be used to perform hue and saturation adjustments, as well as other enhancements. From there, you can adjust saturation and other parameters to fine-tune your image. Launch Viveza 2 and then set the global Hue Slider to 180°. You can also use Viveza 2 directly from Lightroom or Aperture if you don’t have Photoshop. However, you can also use Viveza 2 to perform global hue and saturation adjustments. Nik Software’s Viveza 2 (Part of the Nik Collection by Google) has several interesting features, the most interesting of course is local adjustments via Control Points. You can use Photoshop Elements to perform a 180° Hue shift on your image and get a blue-sky effect. Open your image, and choose Enhance –> Adjust Color –> Adjust Hue/Saturation. In the case of Capture NX2, you can work directly on Nikon NEF (RAW) files. All of these applications work with TIFF and JPEG images. You can perform a 180° hue shift with Photoshop Elements, Viveza 2, and Nikon’s Capture NX2. While not as powerful as channel-swapping, you can get results that are pretty close in most cases. If you don’t have an editor that allows for channel mixing, then an alternative adjustment is to perform a 180° Hue Shift. Lab mode curve inversion (a & b channels) What if you don’t have Photoshop? Again, don’t flatten any layers if prompted to do so. Once you’ve made this adjustment, you can go back to RGB color mode by choosing I mage –> Mode –> RGB Color. The two color channels are called “a” and “b.” All you need to do here is invert the linear curves for both the a and b channels, like so: Invert both the a and b channel curves in Lab Color Mode to create a blue-sky effect. If you have layers in your image, you may be prompted to flatten them. To perform this adjustment, you’ll need to first change your image from RGB mode to Lab color mode. This sometimes produces a nicer result than RGB channel-swapping. If you have Photoshop, you can also do a red-blue channel swap using Lab color mode. Red-blue channel swap using Photoshop CS6 followed by Hue adjustment. Use the Hue/Saturation tool to correct colors in the channel-swapped image. After channel-swapping, you may need to adjust hue to get the colors you want. After swapping the channels, you may need to perform a hue/saturation adjustment to get the colors to your liking. Once you’ve done this adjustment, you can save the values as a preset to quickly apply later on other images.
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Then select the Blue output channel and make the following adjustments: In the channel pull-down menu, start by selecting the Red channel. After you open your image, go to Image–> Adjustments –> Channel Mixer. You can then adjust hues to taste.To do this, you’ll need a version of Adobe Photoshop. This technique changes the red channel to blue, and the blue channel to red. The first way to create the “blue-sky” look is to do something called RGB Channel-swapping. One exception to this is Nikon’s Capture NX2, which can be used with good results on Nikon NEF images (more on this later). Unfortunately, most RAW editors (including ACR/Lightroom and Aperture) do not permit a global hue adjustment of the magnitude required to shift red to blue and vice-versa. In order to make the sky look blue, we need to radically shift the color hues in the image. Unless you have a 830nm (Deep Black IR) conversion, chances are that your images will have red to orange-looking skies, like this: Most infrared images render skies orange or reddish, depending on how you adjust the white balance setting.
VIVEZA 2 APERTURE 3 SOFTWARE
In this post, I’ll explore a couple of ways you can create this effect with different software packages. One favorite technique is the “blue-sky” effect. You can get creative with these colors depending on the type of conversion you have and your software. Nikon 1 V1 590nm (super-color) infrared image.Īlthough infrared cameras capture little or no visible light, you still produce a color image in your camera.
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