Working out the Infrared kinks

Any time you get a new camera there's going to be a learning curve. The more complicated the camera the steeper the hill you have to climb, it's pretty obvious. My new Full Spectrum Panosonic L10 is no exception, but mostly the learning curve is in the post processing. There is one thing that should have been obvious, but its worth mentioning.

When you remove the hot filter from a  camera, the light meter isn't going to read right anymore. The green filter eats up a bunch of light, and when its removed, all the sudden you're overexposing everything. In my camera, a -1 stop exposure compensation seems to be adequate for a normal shot.

So on to the post processing. I had a couple hours of daylight to kill yesterday, so I went out to knock out the cobwebs. Here's what a shot looks like straight from the camera, it's pretty boring:

But with a judicious application of Lightroom, the same shot can turn it into something a bit more interesting like this:

At this point the most critical thing you can do is save this look as a Preset so you don't have to reinvent the wheel next time you have a scene with similar values. Here's another look at the same basic scene with a different Preset:

The best thing about this is that you can get it with the click of a button, sync it to as many images as you want, and you don't have to monkey about swapping channels in Photoshop to get it. This last one is a shot I'm actually proud of, something I would fee no hesitation framing or entering in a contest.