Design Pitstop

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Infrared photography is one of the most distinguishable types of photography. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the more expensive. If you’re using a film camera, it requires the purchase of filters and film, and if you’re using a digital camera, it still requires the purchase of a filter, and sometimes even taking apart your camera and removing the built-in sensor filter. And even then, you’re looking at incredibly long exposure times.
But with Photoshop and some time, you can recreate this effect with any exposure, and no filters or tinkering.


Now, there are plenty of tutorials out there for creating Infrared fakes in Photoshop- and most of them involve the same process: convert to black and white, boosting the greens, while dropping the reds and blues. That’s all well and good- but what if you want to give your images a little more individuality? Very rarely is true Infrared photography (on film) pure black and white- it will, depending on your film and paper, take on other hues- sometimes blues, magentas, or yellows.

This tutorial will show you both how to do the initial conversion, and also how to get that final colorized result.

Part I: Converting to Greyscale

The first thing you want to do is open up your source image. If it’s in RAW format, you may choose whether or not to use Photoshop’s exposure adjustment tools- sometimes they work great, sometimes they muck up the effects down the road. If you are working with JPEGs or TIFFs, you’re good to go right off the bat.

Now with you’re image open, you want to convert it to greyscale using the Channel Mixer (I’m not going to go into the details of the Channel Mixer in this tutorial, as I already have in the previous link). There is no exact setting to use, as it will greatly depend on what is in your image, but generally, you’ll want greens to be boosted as much as possible (200%), while dropping the reds and blues into the negative range. What you are trying to do is replicate what an IR filter does: Absorb the Infrared spectrum (particularly the near infrared spectrum- the infrared spectrum is split into near and far infrared- near is light not visible to the human eye, and far is primarily heat), while reflecting everything else. This makes our reason for dropping the blue values pretty obvious- Blue, Indigo, and Violet are about as far as you can get from red. So why are we dropping the reds and boosting the greens?

The green spectrum is boosted because plants don’t absorb the infrared spectrum, and bounce it straight back out. Since plants are green, this makes your selection rather easy.

You’re dropping the reds because in the real world, most objects that reflect the infrared spectrum rarely reflect the red as well. Note that this isn’t always the case, but in the case of landscape photography, this is what you’re doing.

Each Photograph will use different settings, based on exposure, composition, etc., but these are the settings I used for this picture:

Now you want to add a slight glow. You’ll notice that most infrared photography has a glow to it. So we duplicate the black and white layer (Drag the layer to the “New Layer” icon), and gaussian blur it. The amount of blur you give it will depend on the size of the photo, but basically we want something that looks like this:

In this case, it is a value of 4 pixels for a 600×402 image. Set the blending mode of this layer to “Screen” and give it an opacity of about 60%.

Colorizing the Image

There are a number of ways to colorize any image in Photoshop, all of them equally effective. However, I found this method to be the best when doing a fake infrared photo.
First, duplicate the image you’re working with (Image->Duplicate), and keep the original open (in the background). Convert the duplicate to Greyscale (Image->Mode->Greyscale), and click “Flatten” when it asks you to Flatten the image- we don’t need the layer data in this one.

Now, convert it to a Duotone (Image->Mode->Duotone). You can either use your own colors, or use the colors I found to work quite nicely for Infrared:

Pay attention not only to the colors, but also the curves. Alternatively, you can download my settings and use them.

Either way, your image should now look like this:

Now convert it back to RGB (Image->Mode->RGB). Go back to your original image (keep this one open), and flatten it. Copy it over to a new layer on the colorized version, and Invert it (CTRL+I), setting its blending mode to Luminosity. Flatten your image, and invert once more (CTRL+I), to end up with your final image:

(If it looks slightly different from the original at the beginning of this article, it’s because I recreated some steps in making this tutorial, and some values varied slightly in the process, but still- the overall result is the same).

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Tags: photography, photoshop, tutorials

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