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Capture One and an Infrared Converted Camera - Some Settings

Recently I added a Infra-Red converted camera to my stable of digital cameras. There's been a surprisingly steep learning curve.

The camera was an amateur conversion - some guy on Ebay did his own conversion by simply (I'm sure it's not that simple really) removing the IR filter. As I am using Sony mirrorless cameras, I thought it'd be cool to have a tiny little IR body to play around with. In this case it's a Sony a5000.

Without any filter in front of the lens, this camera creates unremarkable results. In fact, image quality suffers without much notable difference in the visible image. However, if you put a filter on the lens that limits visible light and lets IR pass through the results can be very dramagic. There are some ways to make for interesting color images, but thus far my favorite use of this technique is black and white.

I'm fairly new to Capture One and try avoid Adobe products when I can. So I thought I'd share some of the conversion techniques I'm playing with with you dear readers.

The RAW files that come out of camera look very strange in a less-than-cool way. They are very flat and orange-red in color. Below are a few examples and some simple correction techniques that I find appealing.

Here's what the RAW ARW image looks like with no adjustments (see figure 1 below.) It's flat, dark and very orange.

Figure 2 is the out of camera black & white image without corrections, it's dark and flat. This is how the image looks on the back of the Sony a5000.

Figure 3 is just basic levels correction, and minor adjustments to taste.... except notice that the saturation setting is dialed all the way back.

Figure 4 shows a simple one click auto settings adjustment to the out of camera JPG file, which is simple and quite appealing.

Figure 5 is an example of something weird that happens with the saturation set to "normal." Otherwise all the settings are the same as figure 3. I found this quite surprising and might be a useful tweak for you to try if you're doing the same thing as I am.

figure 1 - Infrared Adjustments in Capture One - Raw Straight out of Camera - No Corrections
figure 2 -Infrared Adjustments in Capture One - JPG Straight out of Camera - No Corrections
figure 3 -Infrared Adjustments in Capture One - Levels and Basic Corrections to RAW ARW file
figure 4 -Infrared Adjustments in Capture One - JPG Straight out of Camera - Auto Corrections


figure 5 -Infrared Adjustments in Capture One - JPG Straight out of Camera - No Corrections but with Saturation set to Normal














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