This is going to be a rather image-heavy post. But before we get to the photos, let me briefly say what it’s all about. Once again, it’s about the TB550/660/850 filter from Midwest Optics. And hopefully it will be the last post on this topic.
As explained in numerous posts in the past, taking photos with this filter and especially image processing does not turn out to be that easy. There are several reasons for this, which I won’t go into again. The fact is: IR subtraction via the channel mixer delivers unsatisfactory results. Primarily a strange sky color, general color artifacts and contrast anomalies.
I therefore chose the path I once took with the green-orange combination: Namely to subtract the IR via the Raw Converter. And lo and behold: It actually gives much better results.
Finally blue sky, finally the color variations that distinguished the original Aerochrome.
Here are some photos I took that way. ONLY with the TB550/660/850 filter, without any additional orange filter. You can see that it meets all the characteristics of Aerochrome: The color changes (e.g. red to yellow), the dark blue sky that is sometimes more cyan, sometimes more blue, depending on the position of the sun, the colors of the plants that range from a soft pink to a dark red. And I finally even managed to make people not as yellow as the Simpsons, they at most have (as in the original film) a slight yellow cast.
Here are the steps in Adobe Photoshop. In the third picture you can see only the last shift in the channel mixer. You have to set 0, 0, 100 for red, 100, 0, 0 for green and 0, 100, 0 for blue.
