Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Photography and portraiture - How to turn everyday landscape photos into dreamy blockbusters?

How to turn everyday landscape photos into dreamy blockbusters?

Infrared photography can transform ordinary landscapes into special exotic landscapes dominated by white, pink, purple and blue, from dark to almost black.

If you are tired of traditional landscape photography, or are ready to try something interesting, you can check out the tips for taking infrared photos.

Below, a photography tutorial will show you how to transform a standard landscape photo into a hyper-realistic infrared image.

Introduction and Equipment

Welcome to the infrared photography tutorial. The first thing we need is a camera capable of capturing infrared light (in general, a Nikon D7000), an infrared filter (HOYA R72), a lens suitable for this type of photography (the lens is 18-105 mm), a tripod, Of course, nice weather. A sunny day is perfect, although cloud watching is also fun.

Photography

Most importantly, find some green (trees, bushes, other vegetation) and a beautiful sky. and, if circumstances warrant, any space with water or building structures.

For manual focus, choose an ISO between 100 and 200 and an aperture between f/4 and f/8. Exposure times range from 8 to 20 seconds. It's also important to take a photo without a filter and then take the same image with a filter.

Post-Processing

Proper image processing will require more work. There are several ways to set white balance. Many cameras allow you to do this before shooting, but I was able to do this after as I found it almost impossible to set the white balance correctly beforehand with the camera.

So, use lightroom software and set up WB in one step: select only the green part of the image (the clearer, the better).

Next, I opened the photo in Photoshop and selected "How to Turn a Landscape Photo into a Surreal Infrared Image" -> "Adjustments" > "Levels" > "Auto" to remove the neutral Tone and lighten the image if necessary.

Now it's time to tackle color channels to change the color of your photography. There are several options, but we use the following: Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer. Select the red channel, change the red (from 0 to 100) and blue (from 0 to 100), and leave the green unchanged.

Then do the same thing with the blue channel, but this time change the red from 0 to 100, the blue from 100 to 0, and the green from 0 to 100.

Now, there are several ways to do this. Paste the original image (standard color) as the top layer, change the Blending Mode and Opacity to 50%. This removes imperfections in the sky and helps increase clarity.

Just change the color of the leaves on the tree to purple. To do this, select the leaf whose color you want to change, open a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and play with the colors until you get the desired hue.

For example, in this case, the hue is +30 and the saturation is +20.

It’s almost done! To get the purple tree color, open a new adjustment layer, this time Selective Color, and play with the colors. Specifically, we'll use magenta until we get the desired hue.