Here is the original image. A picture of a tapestry at the Vatican in Rome. It was shot with a Sony DSC-F707 in "Nightshot" infrared mode. The result is overall green, somewhat underexposed. Sort of what you might see with night-vision binoculars. There is some color hiding in here if you look for it.

At this step, some of the original color was restored. I use a program called Photogenetics. It has individual adjustments for all colors -- RGB and CYMK. For each color, you can adjust the saturation or adjust the shift to the color's complement. So you have 14 sliders to play with. You can also adjust the brightness and contrast. After you find a combination you like, you can save it as a "Genotype" to be applied to other similar pictures. I have several dozen genotypes that I have created, so I just try them one after the other until I find one I like.

The bad news is that Photogenetics is no longer made, and that it was only available for the PC. However, a friend of mine was able to come up with a passable restoration in Photoshop, and I'm sure that other programs can be coaxed to produce a useable result as well. (I don't use Photoshop, so I can't give you any help with this.)

The important thing that this image demonstrates that pictures shot with the Nightshot mode can be restored, with a little bit of work, to show some of the original colors.

The next step is to use a photo editing program to adjust the brightness, contrast, and color rendition of the image.

After that, the image is rendered into Postscript. In this form, it is no longer a bitmap, with a bunch of pixels. It is now a series of shapes that are filled with solid color. The trick is to get enough shapes to render the original image, but with its excessive grain and detail discarded. This gives a sort of "Impressionist" look. More importantly, there is no longer a size limitation. The picture is now a bunch of mathematical curves that can be reproduced at any size.

I use a program called Adobe Streamline for this conversion. It has lots of adjustments that you can tweak to get the look you want. A number of photo editing programs include this facility, and there are several plug-ins that do this.

Once I have the Postscript file, I move it into Adobe Illustrator, a program designed for working with this type of file. Using Illustrator, I render the picture back into a TIFF bitmap. Illustrator allows me to say what resolution to render it at, which allows making a file for a particular print size. A number of photo editing programs will open a Postscript file, but Illustrator allows you to edit the Postscript form of the image, as well as processing other qualities, such as adding an outline to each object.

The last step is to bring the TIFF file back into a regular photo editing program for a last touch-up of the color and contrast, the same as you would do with any photo.

And there you have it. I think that the final result was worth the effort.

One way to learn about this type of processing is to start with the original image at the top of the page. Just drag it from your browser's window to your computer's desktop. Then load it into your favorite image processing program and experiment.

On a side note, I tried the Nightshot mode on the new Sony DSC-H9. It didn't seem to yield the level of detail, or the recoverable colors of this earlier model. In addition, there was no way to add neutral density filters that would have allowed Infrared photography in daylight.

Copyright 1958-2008 Tony Karp