Infra Red and Silver Gelatin Effects in Lightroom

Last week I was in Siem Reap and met the photographer John McDermott who has been based there for over 15 years. His two galleries – one next to the FCC Siem Reap and the other in the bustling center of town – show his collection of hand printed Silver Gelatin and Infra Red pictures taken of the Angkor Wat complex over the last 10-15 years.

These are big, bold, pictures showing an Ankor Wat already disappearing under the pressure of tourism and I would urge you if you are in Siem Reap to look at his work. You can also view it online via his website.

Bayan Temple Angkor Wat

I was looking at some color images I had taken around Angkor Wat (One of which is above) and I began to wonder whether I could create a similar effect in Lightroom, and a quick Google for Infra red and Silver Gelatin plugins brought me plenty of free options, (for the purists I am not suggesting that a quick Lightroom preset will have the same impact as a hand processed and printed IR/Silver Gelatin prints) and the two I liked the best are:

gantico.com/en
Digital Photo Buzz

Once you have downloaded them, then you can copy them in to your the Lightroom Developer presets folder (normally under /Library/Application support/Adobe/Lightoom/develop presets/ on a mac), then make sure you open/restart Lightroom. I found them both a little heavy handed and I wanted a little more grain in m images to mimic the hand processing, so I made a few little tweaks and then re-saved the preset.

Bayan Temple, Angkor Wat as an Infrared image

Each image will of course require some tweaking adjusting, probably some burning and dodging too using the fine adjustment brush, but you can create some pretty remarkable results just with the basic preset.

Have fun and let me know how you get on!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2011 at 4:45 am. It is filed under Lightroom, Tips, Travel and tagged with Cambodia, INfra Red, John McDermott, Lightroom, Lightroom Presets, Siem Reap, SIlver Gelatin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.