Infrared Photography: Understanding, Capturing, and Editing.

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome. In this course, we will dive into the unseen world of infrared light and discuss the techniques and equipment necessary for capturing it with a camera. I will begin with a brief overview of the science of infrared light to give insight into how it behaves in the real-world. Next, I will discuss how to choose a camera capable of seeing in infrared and help you decide if you want to purchase or modify one of your own. Lenses behave quite a bit different with infrared light. So we'll take a look at how to avoid potentially problematic lenses and how to find the good ones. After covering the background and equipment information, it's time to go into the field and shoot. We will examine how the unique behavior of infrared light influences composition choices and how to choose optimum conditions for shooting. We will shoot a variety of locations and subjects, try different things and experiment. Finally, I will show you the complete editing process for every image using Affinity Photo. If you are comfortable with Adobe software, you can recreate the edits fairly easily with them as well. Note that this course assumes you have a basic understanding of photography and editing raw images and that you're comfortable operating your camera in manual mode. So join me today and see and capture the world in a different light. Infrared light. 2. Infrared Light: Let's take a quick look at how infrared light works. All light can be described as a wave traveling through space. The distance between peaks is called the wavelength, which determines its energy. Or in the case of visible light, it's color. The wavelength of visible light ranges from about 400 nm for purple light to 700 nm for red light. This is the light our eyes see and what most photographs capture. Infrared light begins at wavelengths longer than red light, from about 700 nm to 2,400 nm is called near-infrared. This is the light we will be capturing with our camera. Longer infrared wavelengths are associated with heat and will not show up in our photographs. So how do we see this invisible light? Well, our cameras will record the infrared light hitting the sensor and digitally convert it to a visible color. By using a filter in front of the sensor to block visible light, we can exclusively record infrared light or by using a filter that allows a little bit of visible light through to mix into the image. In this example, image taken with a 590 nanometer filter, you can see the infrared light reflected by the plants shows up as blue, and the visible light in the sky comes through as yellow. And then we can manipulate those colors as we like. It is important to remember that all light we see and our cameras sees is reflected by an object from a source light. Some objects will reflect infrared light more than others. The sun produces a lot of infrared light, so it works out perfect for natural light photography. Some artificial light may or may not produce infrared results. It depends on the source, e.g. this LED is emitting some infrared light, although it's quite a bit dimmer than it looks invisible light. 3. Cameras: For this course, we will need a camera capable of capturing infrared light. While most digital imaging sensors are sensitive to infrared light, they usually incorporate a filter to block it as it will interfere with visible light. Therefore, it will be necessary to remove the IR blocking filter from the sensor. Once the filter is removed, the camera is now sensitive to a wide range of light, including infrared. This is called a full spectrum camera, and it is useful for certain niche kinds of photography as is. But for the purposes of creating infrared images, we will need to block some or all of the visible spectrum light. There are two common ways to achieve this, one, place and infrared filter in front of the lens. This is convenient for swapping between different wavelengths of infrared or swapping back to visible light by using another IR blocking filter. And disadvantage of this configuration is being limited to what lenses these filters fit. To place a filter directly in front of the sensor. This limits the camera to whatever cut off wavelength the filter is, and there's no way to use the camera for visible light. However, this configuration allows easy swapping of lenses. I like to have a second camera exclusively ready to go for infrared. So this is the conversion I went with. Although there are merits to both ways of doing it. In either configuration, you will need to remove the cameras standard filter. You can convert a camera yourself, peer company to perform the conversion for you or purchase an already converted camera. A do-it-yourself conversion difficulty varies with the model of camera. The basic idea is to remove the infrared blocking filter. Disassembling and reassembling the camera can be difficult without some experienced tinkering with electronics. It will involve removing delicate connectors and some soldering. Also, the flash capacitor can carry very high voltage, which presents a shock hazard. If you go this route, I recommend practicing on a cheap camera. First, there are several companies that will convert your camera for you. Reputable companies will guarantee their work and this will free you from the burden of not breaking something if you tried to do it yourself. Be aware of cheap conversions is they can use highly inferior filters and perform shoddy work, which will cause a lot of frustration when you're trying to shoot. There are several considerations in choosing the base camera to convert or purchase. Mirrorless cameras are ideal and that the image provided through the viewfinder and screen are of what the sensor sees through the IR filter. In a DSLR camera on the optical viewfinder will not accurately represent what is seen in infrared. Although many DSLRs also offer a live view on the back screen as a workaround. Another drawback to DSLR is that they may rely on visible light for auto focusing, meaning the focus will need to be re-calibrated for infrared. This involves either modifying the camera for infrared focus or a specific lens for focusing in infrared. I personally use a Fujifilm x t one-hundred with a 590 nanometer filter placed in front of the sensor. It's an older camera that I picked up quite reasonably. It can be simple and affordable to get into infrared photography. 4. Lenses: Lenses behave a little different with the long wavelengths of infrared light. Some lenses that are good for visible light may not be the best for infrared. A common issue is a hotspot, a bright.in the middle of the image. This is an inherent issue with the way the lens resolves infrared light. This behavior is more common at high aperture, meaning the lens might still be usable with the aperture wide open. There are some databases of which lenses exhibit hotspots, but they're not comprehensive. This is an important consideration in converting a point-and-shoot camera to infrared as the lens cannot be changed. As far as focal length, I find wide and ultra-wide angle lenses work excellent for many infrared compositions. I also like using a normal length of loans like this 28 millimeter f 2.8 lens. It is a great length for composing landscapes and environmental portraits. He was also a great field of view with low distortion for stitching together panoramas, a favorite technique of mine, which I will cover in greater detail later. I rarely use lenses beyond 50 mm in infrared, but they do offer some interesting creative opportunities. We will take a look at some examples. We'll shooting and editing photos later in this course. I wouldn't worry too much about having ultrafast low aperture lenses for infrared. While there's an opportunity for bokeh rich shots, I usually find the greatest advantage in using high F-stop for maximum depth of field rendering all the unique ways infrared light fills the image. Also, infrared light does not particularly lend itself well to low-light situations, making the light gathering capabilities of fast lenses less advantageous. That being said, the possibilities are endless. These are not rules. Follow your creativity. 5. Filters: In this video, I will show you examples of two common types of infrared filters of 590 nanometer filter and a 720 nanometer filter. Filters are described by the wavelength of light they allowed to pass through. The filter in front of the sensor on this camera is a 590 nanometer filter, meaning only light with a wavelength longer than 590 nm will reach the sensor. This blocks a lot of visible light, but still a bit gets through adding a bit of color variation to the image. If I place this 720 nanometer filter in front of the lens, it will block most visible light and only allow light with a wavelength longer than 720 nm to reach the sensor. This appears much more monochromatic them before the difference between visible and infrared light is clearly seen. This filter is great for dramatic high-contrast black and white images, but it's not so good for color. For this course, I recommend, and we'll primarily use the 590 nanometer filter for a good balance of infrared contrast and color latitude. 6. Software: In this video, I want to discuss software for editing infrared images. A key component for editing color infrared images is the ability to swap color channels or adjust the hue of the color to any other color. This gives complete control for re-coloring and making what is often referred to as false color infrared images. I will use Affinity Photo for editing all the photos in this course and walk through my complete editing workflow. This software combines much of the functionality of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom and features a similar interface. While I do recommend Affinity Photo for this course, if you use the Adobe suite or something similar, you should be able to follow along just fine. I also want to mention another great piece of software called raw therapy. This program is open source and completely free. It works great for editing infrared raw images and is very customizable and powerful. The user interface is a bit different, but fortunately, there's a lot of documentation to get up to speed. It would definitely work for this course, but we will require a little extra work. 7. White Balance: It is important to adjust the white balance setting on an infrared camera. The infrared light confuses the cameras auto white balance. Currently, everything is taking on a very red hue through the camera. While white balance can be adjusted in post editing, it is far easier to set exposure and compose your image with a better white balance setting. I suggest setting the camera to custom white balance in green foliage makes a great reference. But you may need to experiment for each scene. There, it looks far better already. With the first image we took before adjusting white balance settings. Let's take a look at changing the white balance with software. Now after we've taken a picture, I'm using the picker tool and selecting the grass to try change the white balance. But Affinity Photo unfortunately lacks the ability to completely change the white balance and override the settings of the camera and making it very difficult to edit these colors. However, raw therapy can completely adjust white balance. A quick click with the picker tool on the grass. And it's just like we said it in camera. Although the exposure might be a little off still, it will be much easier to edit your colors with the correct white balance settings. Also, you'll be able to gauge your exposure much more accurately when you're shooting. I recommend before each photo session to check and calibrate your white balance settings. 8. Spanish Ruins: It's a beautiful day for shooting. Some infrared photography are subject these Native American Ruins perched on top of a cliff. The sky has a few clouds, which will add some interests but not diffuse the light too much. To start with. I'm going to take a picture of this large stone that forms part of the wall. Plants reflect a lot of infrared light. So this vegetation will really stand out against the rock. I'm seeing a lot of potential for some wide-angle shots here. So I'm going to switch to my 12 millimeter lens. Using a lens of this wide usually works best when we can get close to the subject. I can use it to my advantage here inside the ruins to exaggerate the size of the space and use more of the structure to compose my image. I'm going to take one more picture of the big monolith stone this time with the wide angle lens. Alright, let's take a break from shooting and edit this first batch of photos. 9. 1st Spanish Ruins Edit: Here are the photos I have selected from our photo shoot. I'm going to start with this one and do a simple edit and show you how to manipulate the colors. Affinity Photo is divided into multiple personas. When you import a raw image, you're automatically in the developed persona. This allows you to make broad adjustments to the image. We're going to skip this for now and just click Develop. This moves us into the photo persona. And over here we're on the layers tab. You can see our pixel layer here, which is a background image. We're going to add an adjustment layer by clicking that button right there. We're going to add a channel mixer layer, which now appears above that showing it affects the channels below it. Alright, what we're going to do here is just invert the colors of this infrared image to get a good starting point, to start doing more manipulation to the color. So we're going to take the red on the red channel and put that to 0%. So there's zero red output from the red channel and put blue to 100. And then we're going to go to the blue channel, put the red output to 100% and the blue down to zero. And there we go, the colors of the image have been inverted. You're probably going to want to use this channel mixer adjustment to invert the colors a lot as you edit infrared images. So what I would suggest doing is double-clicking that channel again, clicking Add preset and then making a new preset. So you can quickly do that adjustment again, something like IR color swap. Then the next time you add this adjustment, I'm a delete this one. You can go to the adjustments tab, which also shows all the possible layer adjustments. You can go to Channel Mixer. And simply click your new IR Color Swatch Preset. And then it's automatically done for you. The color channels have been swapped and that new layer has been created. I'm going to do a few more simple adjustments to this image to make it look a little better. It's pretty flat. So I'm going to add a brightness and contrast adjustment layer and increase the contrast a little bit. Okay, next, I'm going to add a hue saturation and lighting layer adjustment. I'm going to pick one of these channels and use the picker to target the color channel of the foliage here and give it a little saturation boost. That's pretty good. I think the sky is blue enough already. That is why I'm just targeting the saturation of these plants. Finally, I'm going to crop the image in a little bit. It's not exactly straight here on the horizon. So I'm going to try straightened a little bit, something like that. It's going to bring this in a little bit. I like this rock here and the bottom-right adds little interest. This unique plant falls right on a line there. So that's good for the composition. I'm going to pull this in a little bit. Get rid of those transparent edges from straightening it. There, that looks pretty good. Very basic edit here. There's a lot more we could do to make it more interesting. But for now, we're going to leave it there. 10. 2nd Spanish Ruins Edit: I'm going to edit the second photo now as you can see, I had the camera in black and white. So the thumbnail shows up as black and white, but once it's imported, it should be in color. There we go. Exposures also way too low. Not sure how that happened. I'm going to bump it up about two stops right away before I hit develop. There we go. That looks much better. To start with. I'm going to add a brightness and contrast adjustment layer. Bump the contrast up a little bit, then bring the brightness up a little bit. Perfect. Now I'm going to add a HSL layer hue saturation and lighting. I'm going to adjust the red channel slightly to try grab some color in the sky. As you can see, it only affects just that little corner up there. I'm going to shift the hue of that sort of magenta, red, bumped the saturation up. Next, I'm going to try grab a color close to that color. So I have two different hues in the sky. I'm exaggerating and stretching the narrow range of color that the camera captured in the sky. There we go, got a red and an orange. Then I'm going to do the same for the foliage. I'm gonna grab another channel. The blue. Get that to kind of a gold maybe coral red color. Now I kinda like the yellow. That looks good. Then I'm going to touch another part of the plant with the color picker and adjust the hue of that. It's kinda change in all of it at once. So I'm going to fine tune what colors it's grabbing by sliding these little bars up here on the color wheel. There we go. It's just grabbing the shadowed part there. Got a nice purple hue there. Bump that saturation up, bumped the other saturation up there. That looks pretty good. I like how these colors came out and I may use it in other images from the shoot. So I'm going to save it as a preset. There we go. Next, I'm going to add a gradient map adjustment layer. This remaps colors based on their luminosity. First, I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. And then on the left here represents the shadows. I'm going to shift the color of the shadows to a purple to exaggerate the effect we were getting before. There we go. And then the mid tones, maybe a bluish color balanced the one for the image. Something like that looks pretty good. And then I'm going to make the highlights warmer, yellowish, orange color. I'm going to bias the mid tones towards the shadows. And now I'm going to turn down the opacity, blend it nicely with our original colors. There we go, and that adds a nice overlay of colors to our old colors. Changes the mood of it. Alright, This image is looking pretty good the way it is. I'm going to add one more little effect here. I'm going to merge all of our adjustments and the pixel layer into a single new layer by going to layer and merge visible. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut of Control, Alt Shift N E. I'm going to do a pretty gentle blur of about 20:25 pixels is a good starting point. Yeah, that looks good right there. Now I'm going to go back to filters and click Apply Image, and then use current layer as source. This allows us to blend the layer with itself. Essentially, I'm going to use the blend mode of multiply. And then the blend mode of this layer with all the layers below it is going to be screen. This then creates a nice soft glow over the whole image, reminiscent of old infrared film. I'm going to turn down the opacity of it though, because this effect can be very overdone. Something subtle like that, That looks great. But it's a matter of taste if you'd like more, feel free to add more glow to it. All right, I'm going to adjust the brightness and contrast one more time here. I think it needs a little more brightness. Touch, more contrast. Great. I'm liking this image. 11. 3rd Spanish Ruins Edit: Onto the third image from our series, this picture of the wall taken with the 12 millimeter wide angle lens. Looks good. So I'm just going to hit develop right away. The first thing I'm seeing that needs to be done is getting rid of these little blemishes that was on the wide-angle lens and it didn't clean off. Before I took it out to the shoot. I'm going to use the impainting brush tool here and just remove these blemishes. Kind of a tedious process, but at least I can save the image. With that done, I'm adding the channel preset that we created before to invert the colors of the image. Next, I'm going to add a black and white channel adjustment layer. Going to set the blend mode to luminosity. Using the cyan and blue sliders, I'm going to darken the sky. I want a nice gradient from the top to the bottom. It's a little tricky here. It's catching most of the sky. I think I'm going to leave it like that. Now I'm going to brighten the foliage with the yellow and red sliders. Looks good. To get that gradient in the sky I wanted, I'm going to create a mask layer filled with black on top of the black and white adjustment layer. I do this by holding Alt when I press the Mask button. And then that hides the layer under a mask. Now where I add white color to the mask layer, it will apply the adjustment layer to that area. I've made both ends of the gradient white mouse, so it's effectively applying it to the whole image. But I'm going to add a toggle in the middle and turn that to black. And there we go. It's just a gradient line now in the middle of the image that hides that adjustment layer. And we have a nice gradient coming to the horizon. I want to add a bit of yellow cast to the ground. There's a few ways I could do this, but for now, I'm going to use a gradient mask. I'm going to set the left side to a yellow warm color. And then the right, I'm gonna make pretty much just white. Now, I'll change the blend mode of this adjustment to overlay or soft light. Soft light or overlay. Think I'm gonna go with soft light, turn the opacity down, something like that. Now I'm going to add another black mask like I did before and just apply it to the ground using a gradient. Bring that right up to the top of the wall there. Turn the opacity down a little bit more. Just like that, a subtle yellow color in the ground. Now, I'm going to add a quick touch of brightness and contrast. Just up the contrast a little bit, up the brightness a little bit. Make it a bit more dramatic. That looks good. I'm not liking how these blue fringes around the clouds look. So I think I'm going to try to saturate the sky towards the top of the image a little bit. Going to add a hue saturation and lighting layer on top of everything. Going to target the blue channel. Bring the saturation way down. That looks good. I'm going to mask it and just have that applied to the top of those clouds. There we go. I like how that looks much better. Okay, I think this photo is done. There's a bit of a strange flare here in the bottom left of the image, but I think I'm just gonna leave it now. I could remove it, but kinda adds an interesting effect. 12. 4th Spanish Ruins Edit: Under the fourth image in our series, this is the wide angle overlooking the walls of the ruins. There's a lot going on in this photo. It's kind of a complicated composition. But while on the right creates a nice leading line to the horizon, and I loved the plant on the left. The first thing I'm going to do is remove the blemishes again that we're on the lens using the impainting brush tool. I'm going to start by adding the hue saturation and lighting adjustment layer with the preset we made from the last image. To get this edit started. I will often use the same color settings to start each edit from the same series to kinda keep the shoot more coherent. Phenomenon up the brightness and contrast with another adjustment layer here. Just make the image pop a bit more, bring out those cool colors in the sky. I'm noticing this lens flare isn't really adding anything to the image and it's kind of distracting. So I'm gonna go back to the inpainting brush tool and remove that. With that done, I think I'm going to bring the brightness up a little bit more. Shadows are a little too intense. That's good. I think I'm going to add a shadow and highlights layer two and bring up the shadows so you can see more detail in those rocks. Yeah, that looks good, Good. Also use a curves adjustment layer for this if you want. But the shadows adjustment works just fine there. I'm going to add a gradient map adjustment. Think for the blend mode this time I'm going to use soft light. I want some cooler shadows, so I'm gonna go to this dark blue color right here. That looks nice. Mid tones. I'm going to use something warm like orange or yellow here. And then the highlights, I'm going to put close to white, but with a little bit of magenta. Alright, and I'm going to blend it by turning the opacity down a little bit. I think it's gotten a little too saturated at this point. So I'm going to add another HSL layer and just bring the saturation down a little bit. I'm doing it with another layer so I can fine tune the overall saturation from the top-down. Just in case I want to change it. Bump the brightness up a little bit more. That's looking good. Okay, The last thing I'm gonna do here is I'm going to try add that glow effect again by merging the visible layers of the image with Control Alt Shift E, or going up there into the Layer menu. And the same thing again, going to use the Gaussian blur. Apply the image. Use Multiply blend mode, and then set that layer's blend mode to screen. There we go. That looks kinda cool on the same edge, but I'm going to turn it down. There we go. I'm liking it. Maybe it's a little too bright now. I'm going to turn the brightness back down. All right, It's looking good. I'm going to save that onto the next image. 13. 5th Spanish Ruins Edit: Onto the fifth and final picture from this photoshoot. This is the wide angle picture looking at the wall with the big monoliths stone. It's similar to the first pictures composition, but with a bit wider angle of view. I'm gonna do a somewhat similar edit, but with a few more tricks thrown in. To start with, I'm going to invert the color channels with our preset. I already have this one saved, but it's pretty easy to copy it. Just a dark blue to a lighter blue in the shadows, yellow in the middle, white for the highlights. The blend mode of overlay and lowered the opacity a little bit. I'm going to add a curves adjustment layer. I'm going to bring the blacks up a bit. I'm going for that sort of map vintage look. Bringing the mid tones down, the highlights up a bit. There. We've got nice contrast. But it's got kind of a flat shadow. Make those shadows just a little bit darker. The wide-angle lens got a bit too much distraction here in the composition. So I'm going to try crop it in a bit to bring the focus to the wall, the monolith stone and that cool plant. I'm making it more of a 16 by nine landscape shot. There. I think it's looking better already. I'm going to try bring the focus even more to the center by adding a vignette. But to create a new pixel layer, use a freehand selection and draw an organic shape around the center of the image. Where I want the focus to lie. I'm going to invert that selection. So I select everything around the center and then I'm going to fill it with black. There we go. De-select everything. Now I will add a Gaussian blur to that black pixel layer. The slider only goes up to 100 pixels, but you can either type in a higher value or grab the image and slide to get a higher blur. I want about 1,000 pixels, very faded blur there. I'm going to lower the opacity. Want to not overdo this effect, just a subtle darkening of the edges. Finally, I'm going to increase the brightness of the overall image with the brightness and contrast layer. And just turn the brightness up a bit. I don't want to put that below the vignette layer. There we go. All right, that wraps up editing this image. 14. IR Flagstaff Monte Vista: I'm on my way to shoot in historic building in downtown Flagstaff, Arizona. It is drizzling slightly and mostly overcast today, not ideal conditions for infrared photography. But this gives me a good opportunity to try and get a good shot in poor conditions. These streets are fairly narrow and the building's pretty big. So I'm going to use my 12 millimeter ultra-wide angle lens. I waited for a few minutes until there was little traffic and some people standing in front of the building. It adds a bit of focus to the shot with the pedestrians in the center. I took a photo at this exact spot on a sunny day a few months ago too. I'll compare an edit both in this video. I'm going to start with the rainy day photo. I got a few water spots on the lens. I'm going to start by using the inpainting brush tool to remove with those blemishes. I'm going to add an HSL adjustment layer. I'm going to target this guy here and change the hue a bit. It's grabbing a bit too much color. So I'm going to try on the red channel here, which is adjacent to that orange that the picker grabbed. And I like that more. It's changing just the fringes of the sky rather than the hue of the entire sky. Next, I'm going to grab the color of these trees, bring the saturation down, the luminosity up a little bit, make it blend in a little better. Let's try add a bit more color variation. I'm going to add another hue saturation and lighting adjustment layer. I want to get a purple color, magenta color in the sky. That looks good. Now I'm going to hold Alt and click the mask to create a black mask. And then I want to make a gradient in the middle, but lets the layers through beneath gonna push those edges up. So we just have that hue saturation and lighting layer applying to the top and bottom parts of the image. It's adding that nice purple fringe to the top and bottom. Turn down the opacity a little bit to get that to blend in better. Next, I'm going to add a brightness and contrast adjustment layer at the bottom of the effect stack here. Bump the contrast up a little bit. Now I'm going to add that soft glow lighting effect like we did in some of the previous images, combined all the visible layers of control, Alt Shift E. There's our new pixel layer with the combined image. Instead of a Gaussian blur, I'm going to add a zoom blur this time. And put the center on those people in front of the building. Further drawing the focus to that point. Make that effect a little bit more intense. I'm going to go to Apply Image once again, apply this Multiply blend mode to itself, then change that blend mode to screen. And now we have this nice halo effect with everything pointing towards the center of the image. The effect is pretty intense though, so I'm going to bring the opacity down. There we go. That's it for this image. Now I'm going to edit the sunny day photo that was taken from the same perspective. The exposure was a little low there obviously in cameras. I'm going to bump that up first. A little more contrast. Maybe. I'm going to try lift those shadows. There we go. I'm going to hit develop and work with layers now. First, a little blemish removal. And now I'm going to add our color inversion preset with the channel mixer layer. You can already see in the sunny image how much more contrast there is and how much more those trees pop and seemed to glow with all that infrared light reflecting off of them. With an HSL layer, I'm going to slightly alter the global hue towards a turquoise red combination. Okay, Actually now I'm going to grab this guy and make it a little more blue instead of that green. Next, I'm going to use the picker and increase the saturation of just the trees. The hotel Monte Vista sign is yellow in visible light, but in infrared it's turned completely white. I'm going to try to turn it back to yellow by selecting each element of the sign, each letter in the sign, and filling it in with yellow. I think we will add nice contrast to the colors that are already in the image in infrared. Got to clean up the selection a little bit. There we go. Now that I have the letters selected, I'm going to fill it in with a yellowish orange color. Oh, the layer is underneath the hue saturation and lightning adjustment layer. So I'm going to move it on top so we have an accurate color. There we go. Alright, that looks pretty good. I'm going to lower the opacity to get that to blend in a little better. And I think that's it for this image. 15. Lake Rock Shot: I am shooting today at a small lake in the mountains and it's quite overcast, which is generally not good for capturing infrared, but there's just enough morning sunlight filtering through to get some good results. I have the tripod setup here in the lake. There's a good amount of sunlight reflecting off the water. I think this will work out great. Alright, let's go and edit this photo. I noticed a few things were wrong right away. I had used a slightly slower shutter speed to smooth the water out. But I think between the movement of the water and the wind, it caused a bit of camera shake. The image is a bit blurred and under normal circumstances, I would probably delete it. I really like the composition and wanted to try recover it. I used affinity photos, detailed refinement tool to try artificially bringing some sharpness back. I also added just a touch of clarity to the whole image. The second issue I noticed was I changed the lenses by the water and a substantial amount of water spray hit my sensor. This caused quite a few spots to show up in the image. So I need to spend a bit of time with the inpainting tool to remove them. With that finished, the first thing I'm going to do is increase the contrast and drop the brightness just a little bit. I'm going to add a hue saturation and lighting layer and shift the whole spectrum down to a red, blue, maybe oranges and turquoise combination. Really like how that's looking already. Probably not going to do too much more to this image. Let's try a gradient map to get a little more color variation. I think I'm going to keep the shadows really dark, almost black. And then add low mid tones of a slightly lighter blue. Then for the mid tones, I'm going to add a desaturated red magenta color. And then I think another warm orange color for the highlights. That saturation down a bit. I think that will work. Let's turn that opacity down. Yeah, it gives it a more morning vibe with those warmer colors. I like it a lot, despite all the issues with the image, it came out pretty good. 16. Trees - Intentional Camera Movement: I'm going to do something a little different for this shot. I'm going to try some intentional camera movement. On the first frame, I'm going to move the camera while I shoot at a low shutter speed. And then I'm going to take another shot with the same frame, but with a higher frame rate and steady, then I will combine those two frames into a composite that should be kinda creative. Let's get to work and edit and combine these two images. I still had a lot of the spots from the last photo shoot on the sensor. So going to start with a bunch of blemish removal. With that finished, I'm going to pull the second image in that had the movement. Clean it up a bit. I will now copying the whole canvas and the one with movement and paste it over the clear one. There we go. We have that new layer on top. I'm going to turn the opacity down a little bit so I can see how they're blending together. They're not quite lined up as expected. I was doing this whole hand-held. So I'm going to use the prospective tool. I'm trying to line up the tree trunks so the images appear a bit more coherent. That looks pretty good in lined up. Now I'm going to turn the opacity of the movement layer to fall and put it behind the focused layer. I will now mask the focused layer and use a gradient to let only parts of the blurred image through. I'm going to have the ends white and then put the middle, right a minute. That's backwards. I'm going to put the ends to black and the middle to white. That way, just the detailed parts of the trees remain in sharp focus. I'm going to turn the ends to a slight gray, so it's not 100% of the effect showing through. I'm going to slide the white part of the gradient up to the top of the trees there we've got that neat sort of hazy blurry at the bottom now and a little bit of that effect in the sky. I have it pretty strong at the bottom and it's just touching the top of the trees now, it's looking pretty good. Next, I'm going to increase the contrast a little bit here. More dramatic. Let's use our infrared color swap on the Channel Mixer preset. Ooh, that's looking really good already. The Sun had come out for this shot and the color difference, the contrast between the sky and the trees is just fantastic. I'm going to crop the image down a little bit. We have that strange transparent edge from where I used the prospective tool to line up the images. So we're going to have to sacrifice a little bit of the image to get rid of that. And those straight branches on the right are kind of distracting. So I'm going to bring it in until those are out of the frame. I have the ratio of the crops that 16 by nine because I think this will make a nice wallpaper for my computer. So that's what I'm aiming for. I like how it looks as is, but I'm going to try to play with the colors just a little bit more. I'm going to add the gradient map that we made for a previous photo with the dark blue in the shadows, orange in the mid tones, and a pinkish highlight. And then use the hue saturation and lighting overlay on that, that we used on one of the ruins shots. Blend that with an overlay and bring the opacity down. Just to get some of those red, orange colors and the trees. That is looking pretty cool. Definitely more dramatic than it was without those layers. So either way is fine, but I like it a little more exciting. 17. Spanish Ruins Panorama: In this video, I'm going to show you one of my favorite and most used techniques for taking landscape photography that is stitching together a panorama. This technique works best with a normal, too short telephoto lens. Using a tripod will give you the best results, but it can be done quite easily handheld. Keeping the camera as level as possible. Take photos about 15 to 25 degrees apart. Rotate your body, keeping the camera pointing to the same level on the horizon. I usually do a total of about 100 to 180 degrees about turning, but this technique will work for a full 360 degrees. Here's what the images look like side-by-side. Now let's take them into Affinity Photo and stitch them together. Start by going to file and new panorama. Click, Add and select your images. Give it a second to load. And when it does, click stitch panorama, now this part can take a few minutes on my computer. I've sped it up here because it took about a full 60 s. Now it shows a rough example of what it should look like when it's done. Click Okay, and again, this takes a few minutes. It shows you a crudely stitched together version, but when it's done, it should look nice and smooth. You can see where I didn't quite keep it level at the end there the transparent edges are showing, I'm gonna click crop and then crop to opaque that will maximize the usable pixel area. For this panorama. If I'd kept it more level, I would have had more room to work with. After cropping, that looks quite nice. Now, let's go ahead and edit this like we would any other infrared landscape. I'm going to make the foliage a nice orange color. Maybe a little more yellow, and then turn the sky blue, turquoise. More blue. We will abort. Boys. Now, I'll kinda like the deep blue that looks okay. I want to make some gradient color change in the sky. So I'm going to add another HSL layer, change the hue of the sky to reddish color, and then put a mask on that layer. Use the gradient tool to just paint the top of the sky. Turn the opacity down to make that blend a little better. Something like that. Next I'm going to add a gradient map. I'm going to use some pastel hues, I think a desaturated blue for the shadows, I'm kinda dark. Bring those mid tones down a bit to cover more of the foreground. They're going to make that pastel pink color. The highlights are gonna be pretty much white overlay and make those mid tones a little darker. Little more saturation in the highlights. Turn the opacity down. Needs to have a little more contrast and brightness. I think. With that done, I'm going to try to get the gradient in the sky to blend in a little bit better. I'm going to erase the part over the Cloud so it's not so obvious where it should be white, but more deep in the sky. So I'm just going to erase that part of the gradient by painting it black. Actually, I think I'm going to go over it with gray, so it has a little bit of the effects showing through to blend better. Finally, I'm going to experiment a bit here by cropping it in. It's a nice wide image, but maybe I should put the right third serve on top of that wall for a better composition. This puts the big cloud at the top-left to lead the eye into the image. And you've got the wall and the bottom right. It looks pretty good like that, but it also looks good on cropped to. So either way, having stitched all those images together gives you a lot of detail and room to experiment with. I think I'm just going to leave it like that for now. 18. Outro: Thank you for joining me today. I hope you had fun, got some great shots and learn something new about infrared photography. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out or leave a post in the discussion area. I plan on adding more photo shoots to this course over time. So please check back for updates. Also, I really appreciate reviews if you have time to leave one. Thank you again and happy shooting.