I had some time on my hands today around noon, so I went to the nearby river to get decent monochrome IR images with the Sigma SD1 Merrill. The weather was perfect, very sunny, the sky sprinkled with heavy cloudscapes.
In the past, my monochrome IR images (done with the SD1) always lacked the brightness in the trees and the darkness in the skies. But since my forays into the world of Aerochrome emulation, I follow an interesting new way of developing my images in Sigma Photo Pro (SPP).
So what did I do? I used a Zomei 760nm IR filter plus a circular polarizer. The trick in post-processing is to NOT use the monochrome mode in SPP but the normal color mode.
I set white balance to Light Bulb and chose Foveon Classic Blue. Through some tweaking in the color matrix (I chose the values G 55.0/A 0.0/M 0.0/B 49.0) and color fringe section (0.5/0.5 — 0.7/0.9) I got very good results with bright white trees, black sky and dark water. The rest, which was a small step, was done in Photoshop… Easy!
