Vista House on the Columbia River

I posted another shot of this view about a week ago but wanted to add this one to the collection too. It shows Vista House perched on a promontory high above the Columbia River just to the east of Portland.

Like last week’s shot, it’s an infrared image but you’ll probably notice that the colour is a lot more vivid in this version.

The work involved in producing a colour IR image is rather more involved than the black and white variety. The images from the camera are basically a collection of reds and oranges so, to get the sky back to something like blue, you have to do some serious post-processing. There are two main steps involved that are IR-specific. First, I use Nikon’s (free) ViewNX application to shift the image white balance a very long way until I get as much contrast as possible between the sky colour and the foliage. I then save this image as a TIFF to bake in the change before opening it in Photoshop where I use channel mixer to swap the contents of the red and blue channels. This gives me an image that looks roughly like this one and further post-processing continues as it would for any normal colour image (curves, local adjustments, colour tweaks, etc).

Posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2012 in: All Images, Infra Red, Landscape, Travel, Columbia River, gorge, infra red, infrared, IR, Portland, valley, Vista House, Vista Point, Women s Forum