This is the third in a series describing a basic infrared workflow. This section briefly describes the surreal world of invisible energy and “false color” effect.

Infrared photography is all about capturing invisible energy with a camera’s sensor and forcing it into the visible light spectrum. This sounds great but without special adjustments to both camera and post processing software everything comes up red. The camera fix is simple if you have a Nikon D70sIR. Select custom white balance, shoot a bright green patch of grass and the problem is solved. Images viewed on the camera are now beautiful shades of red, white and blue.

Since camera manufactures don’t like sharing trade secrets with Adobe, features like custom white balances often do not load along with the image during post processing. What they have done is provide a ”DNG Profile Editor” that allows the creation of unique camera profiles. These profiles control mapping of colors when loading RAW files into Adobe editors. In short we can override the limited white balance ranges in Lightroom and effectively force a hue shift and fix the red issue during post processing.

At this point we are not too concerned with the actual image colors. More importantly we have two distinct colors which we can manipulate independently. All this and more in the fourth segment.