Editing infrared: white balance and the channel swap

Straight out of the camera, most color infrared photos look like a wall of red. That is normal. Two edits stand between that red mess and the classic look with blue skies and glowing foliage: a proper white balance, then a channel swap. Neither is hard once you have done it twice.

Before anything: shoot RAW

RAW keeps all the sensor data, and infrared editing leans on white balance moves that JPEG cannot survive. If you only remember one thing from this page, shoot RAW.

Step 1: white balance

The goal is to pull the red cast out so foliage lands near neutral.

In camera. Set a custom white balance off green grass or foliage, close enough that it fills the frame (Kolari). Do this once at the start of a shoot and your previews stop being red, which makes composing and judging exposure much easier.

The Lightroom problem. Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom clamp the temperature slider, and for many cameras (Nikon and some Fujifilm bodies especially) it cannot reach the values infrared needs. The fix is a custom camera profile: convert one of your RAW files to DNG, open it in Adobe’s free DNG Profile Editor, drag the temperature all the way down, and export the profile. Select that profile in Lightroom and the white balance slider suddenly has the range you need. You only have to make it once per camera (Kolari).

Editors like darktable and RawTherapee do not have the same clamp, which is one reason some infrared shooters prefer them.

Step 2: the channel swap

White balance alone gives you golden foliage and a yellow-brown sky. The blue sky comes from swapping the red and blue channels.

In any editor with a channel mixer (Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity):

1. Output channel Red: set Red to 0, Blue to 100.
2. Output channel Blue: set Blue to 0, Red to 100.

That is the whole trick (Kolari). The sky, which was recorded red, becomes blue, and the foliage shifts toward white or gold depending on your filter.

If you would rather not do it by hand, free one-click options exist: Kolari publishes a set of Photoshop actions, and plugins like Flaming Pear can swap channels in one step (LifePixel).

Step 3: finish

After the swap, the image usually wants a little help: set the black and white points (auto tone gets close), add contrast, and nudge the hue or saturation of the yellows and blues to taste (Kolari). Small moves go a long way; the look is already in the file.

When you can skip all this

Shooting at 850nm? There is barely any color to balance or swap. Set a mono conversion, adjust contrast, and you are done, which is exactly why deep filters are loved for black and white. See the filter reference for where each cutoff lands.

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Shooting side questions first? See focusing and exposing in infrared. Not sure your filter suits false color? Check the filter reference.