 Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Well, it seems that Kodak isn't taking my campaign very seriously. The campaign to bring back air chrome by chugging a flaming hot mountain daddy every day until it's re-released. So whatever. Let's find an alternative way. Chances are, you're a little bit like me and you want to take cool ass red photos like these, but you don't want to have to sell both of your kidneys to afford a real role of Kodak air chrome because, well, if you did, you'd be f***ing dead. There may be a way, but it's probably not what you think. Kodak air chrome, otherwise known as Kodak air chrome, is a near infrared false color positive film stock that was discontinued by Kodak in 2009, which may just be one of the greatest losses humanity's ever felt, and Kodak literally doesn't give a s*** about it. I'm not going to lie to you. We have quite a bit of ground to cover. It is a bit of a technical process to rebuild something that somewhat resembles it. An interesting cross-section between photography and compositing. Two things that I pretend like I know a lot about. This process is quite involved. If you're more on the hobbyist side of photography, then this might not really be for you. So here's the lowdown. Here's how I've been concocting these fake air chrome images over the past year and a half. The ugly truth is, I use an infrared sensitive digital camera with certain filters on the lens. And then I take those files, run an algorithm over it, and finally transfer that image to film. Sounds like a lot, right? And I bet you have some questions. Don't you worry, we'll get into it. But whoa, whoa, whoa. Jason, did you say digital camera? You son of a b***h? You swore off digital in all of its if and statements. Yeah, but at this point, what other choice do I have? It's about the application. All film solutions to make air chrome do exist, but they're mostly related to trichrome. I've documented a custom-built beam splitter rig that does it, as well as a Rito 3D camera build. So you do have options. However, of all of them, this one is probably the easiest. So let's start at the beginning. The only way to effectively capture infrared nowadays is black and white film or a digital camera. Digital cameras do have UV and infrared light sensitivity by default, but digital camera manufacturers place filters over the sensor to block that kind of extraneous light. Otherwise, you get weird, unnatural colors, like that rash on my ass that several doctors have written international research papers about. Some businesses offer a technical service called a full-spectrum conversion of your camera, which basically removes or adjusts those over-the-sensor filters, which is what we need to do to get started here. I picked up an old Sony A7R2 and shipped it off to a company that converted it to full-spectrum, which means they removed both the UV light blocker and infrared light blocker over the sensor for me. It's like jail-breaking your digital camera, kind of. Be aware, though. Once you do this process, it likely cannot be undone. So maybe you just find an old digital camera you have lying around, or maybe one that you just hate a lot to use as tribute. Something 24 megapixels or higher will do great if you're going to transfer to a 35mm film like I mentioned earlier, but let's not jump ahead just yet. Okay, so you have your full-spectrum camera. Next, you'll need a lens and some filters. Choosing a lens is very important. Some lenses have this issue called infrared hotspotting. To my understanding, it's still kind of unclear exactly what causes this, but you'll need to do some research ahead of time about whatever lens you go with. I have found that vintage lenses with the infrared focus scale printed on them actually perform pretty well and do not have the infrared hotspotting. You can take a look at the infrared hotspot database online to see if your lens qualifies. I hate to say it, but this is actually an area where Leica and Zeiss lenses tend to excel. I use my own 35mm Sumacron and it works like a charm. But there wasn't any information online saying that it would work, so I just had to test out all my lenses and see what worked the best. Now, filters. That thing your family doesn't have when you get together for family dinner. Filters are the most important part. They're the whole crux of this whole damn convoluted process that is probably currently ruining your day. To understand why we use certain filters, which I'll get into shortly, we need to understand how this process works a little bit beforehand. Basically, OG Formula Kodak Aircrumb swaps around the color channels of traditional film to remap the colors of the spectrum for human eyes. The speedrun version is the red channel captures and displays infrared light. The green channel captures and displays visible red light. And the blue channel captures and displays visible green light. Luckily for us, digital sensors work kind of in a similar fashion. They also have red, green and blue arrays, which means we have three channels to f**k around and do some dumb s**t with. So what if we could cut visible light out of one of those channels and then use that channel to composite out information from the other two channels? Pretty abstract stuff, right? I did not think it would work either, but alas, here I am making this s**t video when I should be home with my family for the holidays. Full disclosure here, this is not my idea at all. My brain doesn't function on this level. I get headaches looking at spaghetti and trying to figure out how the whole damn thing got knotted up like that. This concept has actually been around for a minute. So long, it was actually posted on a dead platform, or at least dead to me. I definitely want to give credit to the original user who goes by J.W. Wong, who conceptualized this whole idea and then posted their findings online for me to crank my hog to 13 years later. Basically, the idea is to cut off all visible blue light entering the camera so that the blue channel of any image taken on a full spectrum camera becomes effectively just infrared light. We then take that information and deduct it from the other two channels and then swap some things around and boom, you have a semi-true digital emulation of Kodak Aerochrome. Great. So what filters do we need to get this done? It's easy and you probably already have them. A yellow filter will block all visible blue light for you. I use the Tiffin Yellow 15. A yellow 12 is also suitable. And if you're like me and you're using a full spectrum camera, you'll need a UV filter to block out UV light, which may contaminate the process. So now you got your setup going, infrared sensitive camera, lenses and filters. Now time to go shoot. Before you go slay some bangers, the hottest bangers that you've ever laid your weak, shifty little eyeballs on. Here are a couple of tips from a guy who's been doing this for years at this point. For starters, shoot in bright midday light like real Aerochrome. You'll get the best results. Use your camera's base ISO. The base ISO will produce a clean image with little to no noise break up. And since we're pop lock and dropping the channels around afterwards in the edit, we will want something smooth. And yeah, you should also definitely shoot in raw. Say your white balance on your camera to about as low as it'll go. I mean, you're probably at your lowest point too if you're watching this video. So no reason your camera shouldn't be there either. I think on my Sony, that is the tungsten white balance profile, which is like 2700 Kelvin or something like that. This just helps you visualize your image better. And finally, underexpose your shots. I typically leave the exposure compensation dial on the A7R2 to minus one. Just do your best to watch out for blown highlights. Think of it kind of like blowing out your pants with shit on a first date. There's no coming back from it. Okay, so we took a photo and it looks all yellow, like the floor of a men's bathroom anytime, anywhere. But there's also some purple plant life that helps us more or less visualize our shot. Good. Now what? It's time to cook, bitch. This is something that I actually enjoy about this process. Kind of like film, when you take a photo, your work isn't done there. There is still some back end work that needs to be done for it to be completed. You still need to kind of digitally develop your photo for it to be fully realized. But instead of dunking your memory card in E6 chemicals, maybe just open up Lightroom instead. But Lightroom, today we ball in Photoshop, which is literally the worst program on the planet. But nobody uses After Effects or Nuke for photo compositing like me. So I'll just have to suck it up this one time. If you have any programming experience, I would highly recommend finding a way to automate what we're about to do for you. It'll save you a hell of a lot of time. Here is JW Wong's original algorithm. If you're smart and understand this kind of shit, otherwise worry not. We're going to walk through essentially the same steps that the algorithm does just here in Photoshop. To save time, you can probably even make a Photoshop action out of it. Hell, you can maybe even make a Fuji film simulation from it. But I'll only allow it if you call the recipe Flaming Hot Aerochrom. Cool. So in Photoshop, let's start in by duplicating the image three times and then splitting out the channels to red, green, and blue via channel mixer adjustment layers. Then control click and create a group for each respective channel and name them accordingly. OK, let's refer again to the charts. Basically what this diagram is saying is that we need to deduct the infrared pixels from the red and green channels and then recombine. So to do that, let's pop open the blue group, control click both those layers and copy, right click and merge those copies and then label it infrared and drag it to the top of the red group. Change the blend mode to subtract and change the opacity to maybe around 50% for starters. It's not really a fine line between infrared light and visible light. So a 50% deduction seems to work well to begin with. This is adjustable afterwards. In fact, it is highly likely it will not remain 50% once you start playing around with the settings. Let's now grab a new adjustment layer curves and take the center gamma and drag it down a little bit. Cool. Now we can do somewhat the same for green. Duplicate the infrared layer from red and drag it to the top of the green group. And just like the former Soviet Union, we can collapse the reds. I usually set the subtract infrared layer to about 80% to start out. Now let's add a curves. This time I usually place it before the subtract and then boost the center gamma just a little bit. Cool. That's that for green. And the blue group, which is again just infrared light, we want to decrease the signal a little bit. So let's add a curves and grab the center and heave. Now let's assign each group to an RGB channel. Starting with red. If you recall, the red channel in Air Chrome is remapped to the green channel. So let's pop in a new channel mixer adjustment layer on top. Set the red value to zero and the blue value also to zero. Okay, now onto the green channel, which should be remapped to blue. New channel mixer, red to zero and green to zero. And finally our blue channel, our sole infrared channel gets assigned to red. So new channel mixer and green to zero, blue to zero. Great. Now here's the fun part. Turn on all your groups, not in a sexual way unless that's what gets you going. Grab your top group and set the blend mode to screen. And then grab your middle group and also set the blend mode to screen. Chances are it'll look a little dark. Let's boost the overall gamma by adding a curves adjustment layer and bringing it up quite a bit. For better or worse, that's basically the workflow. You can now start playing with the settings a little bit to get it to look a little bit more like Air Chrome by adjusting how much the subtract chokes out the red and green channels with the opacity. And you can adjust the signals for each layer by playing with the curves until you get a balanced image. If you're new at this, it will probably take you some time to figure out how all the settings intermingle. But if you do play around with it for a while, it will start to make some sort of sense. This is the moment where you can decide if you want to go with the bright poppy air chrome look or the violent tortured red air chrome look. I recommend building some profiles out of the different recipes that you put together, like flat, contrasty, more pink, red, etc. Not every situation seems to work with this default balance. It's just kind of a trial and error thing, mostly error to be honest. So while I think the results look really cool at this point, it was also not quite a hundred percent for me. I felt like I could take it just a tiny bit further and really land the overall style a bit more. So let's copy the image to celluloid. Now, you may be absolutely disgusted at the concept of shooting digital and copying the film. I don't blame you. I was at first too. But if it's good enough for Greg Frazier, then you know what? It's good enough for me. And it should be good enough for you too. Unless, for some reason, you think you're better than the guy who shot Dune transferred digital to film and then won an Oscar for it. Typically for the image transfer, I use Kodak ectochrome, a very close cousin of Kodak Aerochrome, often boxed as Kodak ectochrome infrared back in the day. The transfer process is pretty simple and unoriginal and f**k it. Probably not the best way to do it. I just use an iPad and point my camera at it in a dark room with a macro lens. Yeah, that's it. 35 millimeter film doesn't really resolve that high, so I've never had any issues seeing, you know, screen pixels in any of my images. I typically rate the ectochrome in my camera at about 200 ISO or even 320 ISO to purposefully underexpose it. I don't know if you've ever shot Aerochrome, but when I have it typically looks pretty underexposed, maybe because it's an expired film or maybe because light meters don't read infrared light or maybe because I'm just a loser and no one will ever truly love me. But regardless, I think that underexposed look has become kind of part of the aesthetic of the film. So I lean into it a little when shooting at the iPad. I use an 81B filter to negate some of that blue light from the screen and warm up the ectochrome a little bit. It's a stock that just loves blue and purple and also being super expensive, like really what the f**k Kodak. But anyway, let's help ourselves out and reduce some of those cooler tones a bit. And finally, I use a macro lens from the Pentax 6x7 system to transfer the images because at least on 35 millimeter film, you're only using a small center part of the larger lens circle. So it's a nice way to avoid any additional corner vignetting or artifacts when transferring. Powerful. Just like my son's legs, say something nice about them in the comments so he doesn't feel bad. And then afterwards, go get your ectochrome developed and come back when you're ready to wrap this b**ch up. All right, we have our ectochrome with infrared transferred onto it. We've scanned our images in the Lightroom and it hasn't crashed in a while. Life is good. We can put some final touches on the scan if we want or you can just leave it alone. After all, you're the artist. And if you want to look like s**t, that's your thing. I typically will add some orange, the shadows, and some yellow to the highlights. Bump the color temperature maybe a little bit and then maybe darken the blues to match the look a little bit better. I like pulling up some reference images to real ectochrome so that I can color match a bit more effectively. Now you're done, I guess. You can go ahead and post it on Instagram and get the usual two likes from your mom and dad because photography on Instagram is dead. Just remember to use the hashtag. My photography sucks and I don't seem to be getting any better with practice. All this is fun and cool and exciting, but what about the philosophic implications of this process? There are none. Does this whole process replicate ectochrome to a T, star coated lens? Not at all, but it's pretty damn close and it's a whole hell of a lot cheaper and less expired than the real deal. And in the end, as Steve Yedlin would probably say, if you can't tell the difference, it doesn't matter which approach you use. Just make it look f**king sick. Kodak isn't bringing back ectochrome, at least probably not. It was never their most popular stock. So personally, I'm just going to keep cooking with this formula for the time being. It's quite fun and it's a nice tool to have in your photographic arsenal for when the mood strikes. But now that the technical has been solved, how do we go further with this look? It's one thing to lean on ectochrome for the wild rendering it has, but that's surface level s**t. Taking foliage and turning it red doesn't make it a good photo. Otherwise, every photo from Lomo Purple would be a certified chart-topper and not piping hot s**t from an a**. Ectochrome is the same and needs to find the right application in the right projects. Richard Moss famously shot it in the Congo during a conflict that was largely unseen by the Western world. In his mind, he saw the application of using a film stock that can detect an invisible wavelength to shed light onto what was happening in the country. And it's become a highly celebrated and referenced collection of work. For me, and the question that you should also be posing to yourself if you're considering doing this, is simply how do I take this look and apply it to my own work, my own style? How does Jason, who now refers to himself in third person, I guess, merge his Edwardian hopper-esque style with psychedelic red bloom? Or does it fit in with the rest of my work? That might just be a bigger question this video has time to answer. But speaking of the constant unwavering march of time, and before we run out of it, I'd like to first thank the sponsor of today's video, Squarespace. Well, now you have loads of surreal and otherworldly looking photos and you want the general masses to see them, but how? Well, most people have access to websites nowadays, so how about building one with Squarespace? You can start with one of hundreds of professionally designed templates you can pick from and furnish your new site with Squarespace's intuitive user interface that allows you to build portfolios, blogs, and even member areas. With an incredibly simplified building module at your fingertips, it's never been easier to build the website you need faster than ever before. 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After all, I don't know what you want, but now that Aerochrome has somewhat been solved, at least for me, through several different processes, including the one covered in today's video, does that mean I can stop chugging these flaming hot abominations of basically diarrhea activator, to be honest with you? I never thought this day would come the day I could put down the dew bottle. It's been a long road. Body aches, tremors, meat sweats for some reason, and diabetes probably now. Maybe I'll just have one more sip for old time's sake. No chug, just one final taste for my system to ease itself out of the state of shock it's been in ever since the campaign started. Hmm, you know what? These actually aren't too bad.