Yes, it's true! A quick review will soon be posted regarding a recently acquired 20D that has been converted to shoot IR only by Lifepixel.com and will include plenty of black and white digital infrared shots. Don't start holding your breath just yet since this camera just got into our hand so we'll need a little time to play with it before posting but rest assured that a review is forthcoming.

Until then, I'll leave you with a dragracer whose car is resting among a light cloud of burnout smoke. This shot was taken with a Canon EOS 1D digital camera, ISO speed 800, 1/30, f2.8 with Canon's wonderful 70-200mm f2.8 IS zoom lens.

Lets take a look at one quick and easy way to convert your digital color photographs to filtered black and white pictures using
Paint Shop Pro
by Corel. This is a down and dirty example that is easy to follow for current PSPX or newer owners without getting too complicated with different steps along the way. For this BW conversion we'll start with a normal color digital exposure such as the one below and opening it in Paint Shop Pro.


Shot with a Canon EOS-1D, F10, 1/400, ISO 200 using the Tamron 28-75 f2.8 zoom lens and a Canon Speedlite 580EX flash for fill light.

With the image that you have chosen open in PSP use your mouse to select the “Effects” tab along the top of the program window. With the Effects tab expanded scroll down to “Photo Effects...” selection and click on the “Black and White Film...” command. This will bring up a preview window with the original image on the left and a converted black and white picture on the right. Click “OK” and save the new image file and you're done, easy as can be.



This particular shot was chosen to show the different effects of the Red channel filter because it shows extremely well with the orange Honda CBR 600RR motorcycle. At the bottom of the preview window you can select the color you want to filter and the strength of the filter. You do not need to adjust any of these setting if the image above is what you are looking for. If the original image was converted using the red filter in the “Black and White Film...” with a strength of 25 the results are quite different with the original orange of the Honda becoming significantly lighter than in the basic black and white conversion image. Notice that there are small changes to the highlight areas of the blue Yamaha R6 but that the majority of the blue tones remain unchanged.



Taken to the full effects of the red filter with the strength set to 100 the results are very profound as any red channel color in the image will be filtered out to appear white. The picture below was converted with the red filter strength set to 100.

Today's picture is actually an IR (infrared, or really near-IR) shot converted to Black and White during post processing. This shot was taken with an old but still fun to use Panasonic DMC-FZ1 with the FZ2 firmware flashed onto it. The camera was in Tv, shutter priority mode set to 1/20th and the aperture was f2.8, ISO 200 and it was taken hand held thanks to this wonderful cameras optically stabilized lens. A Hoya R72 55mm IR filter was used to block visible light and the white balance was simply set off grass in the sunlight.



You can see that black and white digital infrared photographs have great contrast and sharpness with an eerie feel not available with standard black and white photographs. The deep black water and white foliage really set infra-red shots apart from many normal BW shots.