The short answer: to edit a color infrared photo in Lightroom Classic, first apply an infrared camera profile so the color temperature can go low enough, then click a neutral subject, such as a cloud, with the White Balance Selector. Next, decide how to handle color: keep the infrared colors, swap them in Photoshop, or swap them in Lightroom with an enhanced profile. Then finish the image with global adjustments and masks for the sky, the subject, and any distractions.
This workflow works for color infrared images taken with a converted camera and a filter from 550 nm to 780 nm, or with an unconverted camera and a 720 or 780 nm filter. The video walks through every step on one image, and the steps are detailed below.
Before: the raw 590 nm image, shot with a Fujifilm GFX 50S full spectrum converted camera, Fujinon GF 45mm f/2.8 lens, and STC Optics 590 nm IR Pass clip-in filter.
0:00 I'd like to step through my workflow for editing color infrared photography in Lightroom Classic. This particular image was taken at Zion National Park. It was shot on a Fujifilm GFX 50S with the 45mm f/2.8 lens. The filter used was a STC Optics 590 nanometer infrared filter. That was the clip-in variety. The techniques that I'll cover today will work with any infrared images shot on a converted camera with a filter of 550 nanometers or higher.
0:31 They'll also work with images shot with an unconverted camera with a 720 nanometer filter. Okay, let's get started. The first thing that I want to do is set a white balance. So I'm in Lightroom's Develop module and I'll go to the basic panel and I can grab my white balance selector here or hit the W key and I will click on a cloud.
0:55 I like using clouds as a white balance target. A couple things that you'll notice here. First of all, the white balance didn't fully get set. I still don't, my clouds aren't truly white and I'm still seeing kind of a tint, a reddish tint in the image. If I look over on the temperature slider, I'll see that this capped out at the bottom end of the scale, 2000 Kelvin, and it's not getting as far as I need it to.
1:19 So what I'll need to do is use a temperature-shifted profile in order to set a proper white balance. I have a couple of those here. I have one for temperature shifted to negative 50 and one to negative 100. You can create these yourself using the DNG Profile Editor or you can download the free Infrared Profile Pack where I have over 140 cameras supported with infrared profiles.
1:49 So in this case I will select the negative 100 and now this will shift the colors in the image and now I can set a white balance again. So I'll hit my W key and I will go over to the clouds and click on the clouds. Clouds are white, the sky is a nice clean yellow color, and the trees are blue.
2:03 So now I have a good white balance set. If clouds aren't available, other good topics for setting a white balance would be could be the other parts of the ground, gravel, concrete, sidewalks, roads, there's a whole variety of things that you can use for a neutral color. If you're using a 720 nanometer or higher filter you could also white balance on trees or grass.
2:29 Now that I have my white balance set, I want to think about swapping colors. There's three options that I have when I want to swap colors. First I could choose not to swap colors. I could take these colors as is or modify them without a color swap. The second option is to swap colors in Photoshop.
2:47 The third option is to swap colors right here in Lightroom. Let's cover all three. Let's say that I don't want to swap colors. I like these colors the way they are or maybe I want to tweak them a little bit. Let's talk about some of the options that we have available. The first option is to go down to the HSL panel.
3:05 From here, I could adjust the hues of individual colors. For example, I could grab the picker, grab the sky, and then click and drag up and down so that making the sky a little bit more green or a little bit more red. So there's some creative choices that I have there for the sky.
3:25 I'll double click to reset that. Still holding my picker, I could go to a tree and then I could drag up to go up into the purple range or I could drag down to get into some greens. So again, lots of choices here for a creative adjustment of my colors. Let me reset these values back.
3:49 So that is changing colors, individual colors with the HSL panel. The other option you have is to go down to calibration and from calibration, can affect the for the primary colors of red, green, and blue. So if I grab the red hue slider, I can shift that around. Now for this particular image, it's going to have the effect of just really adding or decreasing saturation with the blues and with the reds and the greens will have the same effect, the opposite direction, but basically the same thing.
4:21 But if I come down to the blues, now the blues will allow me to globally change all of the colors. So I get these purple trees and green sky at one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum gets me orange skies and green teal trees. So these are some of the options you have to play with if you choose not to swap your colors.
4:43 Perfectly valid option. The next option for swapping your colors is to do that in Photoshop. So we would click right click on the image and select edit in Adobe Photoshop. Now not going to cover that here in this video. I've got videos that cover a complete walk through a Photoshop where you can see the entire process.
5:02 I also have videos on my actions in Photoshop that are designed specifically for color swapping. So check those out. Those will walk through the specific details of how to swap colors in Photoshop. The third option for swapping colors is to do so directly in Lightroom. And in order to do that, you'll need to use the color swap profiles.
5:25 These are profiles. If I go under basic and the profile browser I'll see the ones that I have installed under IR color swap. And I've got a set for negative 50. I've got a set for negative 100. These are profiles that take the actions from Photoshop. They export those as a LUT and then they combine them with these temperature shifted profiles to allow you to do this all in one.
5:51 Color temperature to get a good white balance in Lightroom and swap colors all in a single profile. You can either create these yourself or you can download them from my website. So let's take a look at some of these that are available. I have the hue option, which shifts the hue of all the colors 180 degrees.
6:08 I have the invert option, which uses that invert method within Photoshop. I have the RB method, which is a channel mixer that swaps the reds and the blues. I have another channel mixer that swaps in the reds and the blues and then takes the green channel and pushes it to blue. Another one that swaps the reds and the blues and takes the green channel and pushes it to red.
6:33 And then another one that does the swap and then splits the green channel half goes to red and half goes to blue. So as you can see, just from these six different profiles, I have a variety of colors and a variety of looks that I can choose. The split, splitting the green between the two, tends to produce skies for me anyway that tend to look the most realistic.
6:53 Sometimes with some filters, the invert filter will also do that and provide produce skies that look very realistic. It just depends on the filters you're using and the sensors in your camera. Using these is they'll all treat colors a little bit differently. So for example, if I use the split method and close that out, that's going to apply a certain technique that kind of eliminates the greens from the image.
7:18 That'll have an impact if I go down to HSL and start to play with the hues. If I use the hue picker and try to shift the hue of the sky, you'll see it actually doesn't change the hue. It just increases the saturation really. And the same thing if I go to the trees and try to adjust the hue of the trees, it doesn't really change the hue.
7:40 It just impacts the saturation. But let me reset these to zero. If I go back to the profile browser and select the invert method, now if I go down to HSL and try to shift the hue of the sky, you'll see that it actually does change the color because I have that full range of colors that I'm working with with the invert method.
8:00 And if I do the same in the trees, we'll go all the way from greens on one end to bright pink on another end. So just be aware that the different color swap profiles manipulate colors differently and as a result will have different impacts on the way that HSL works. Okay, so let me reset these back to zero.
8:23 For this edit, I'm going to go back and I'm going to select the split method because I'll just take those color pretty much as is and we'll work from there. So now that I've done my color swap, I can continue to edit the image. The first thing that I'd like to do is to crop the image.
8:42 So I can use the crop tool here, or I can click the R key to bring up the crop tool. I'm going to bring in the right side here to focus a little bit more on the rock face where I'm more interested in. So we'll bring it to about there and then look up and down to see where I want this to land.
9:01 Okay, that looks good. All right. So I can hit done or the R key and now I've finished my crop. Now I can look at some global adjustments. I think I'm going to bring down the overall exposure, just a smidge, not too much. Increase the contrast of the image. Then I'd like to come to tone curve and I'm going to add a little bit more contrast in the tone curve.
9:25 I'll use the medium contrast to punch up the image a little bit more. The next thing I'd like to do is tweak my colors a little bit. So I'll come into the HSL panel and I want to darken up the trees a little bit. So I'll go to luminance, grab my picker and I'm going to darken up the trees.
9:39 That'll kind of have the effect of making them a little bit more saturated as well. Just a little bit. Oh, that looks really good. I might increase the saturation just a bit as well. Okay, I like the way that that looks. I'm going to deal with the sky separately. So for now, I'll just deal with these colors here.
10:02 That looks good. Let's deal with the sky. I used to use more of the global settings in the basic panel, but with some of the new masking tools, I find myself instead of using as much global settings, shifting more towards using the masking tool and then applying the settings locally more selectively based on a mask.
10:19 So let's open this up and we'll click on the masking option. We've got the new option, select subject and sky. Let's start with the sky. So while that is calculating the sky, I'll let you know that tends to work very well with images where the colors have been swapped. You have a blue sky and white clouds.
10:40 There you go. We've seen the sky has been selected there. I have noticed that sometimes in images that are not yet color swapped, that the algorithm has trouble identifying the sky because it's not a blue sky. It could be a yellow sky. The colors could be off. So sometimes the algorithm will struggle with that.
10:58 Sometimes it's fine. Just be aware of that when you're trying to do a select sky, you might have a little bit of a challenge when the colors haven't yet been swapped. Now that I have my sky selected, I'm going to increase the dehaze. This is another nice area for having a mask. Dehaze can add a ton of contrast, but it's sometimes overkill on the ground, but I like the impact that it has on the sky.
11:25 We'll do that. And then I think I'm actually going to increase the saturation just a little bit as well. Punch up the blues a little bit. So now I've made some changes to my sky. Let's create a new mask. And I'm curious, you know, the select subject, we'll see what this does. This works really well with certain subjects that I've used, people and other objects.
11:46 It can be a little bit hit and miss with landscapes. So let's see what it does when we select the landscape and where it goes. Sometimes I'll use it, sometimes I won't use it depending on the landscape that's been selected. In this case, it actually does a pretty good job of selecting the rock face, even though that was very dark, it selected that rock face.
12:04 And that's great because I want to bring that rock face out a little bit. So first of all, let's up the shadows. And I'm going to do this substantially to get it a lot brighter. And then I want to increase the texture so we can see more of the rock details there and the clarity.
12:24 That'll help a lot. Some of these settings, especially things like texture, clarity and dehaze. I always found myself really limiting the impact that I made with those on a global level, because while it might produce an effect nice somewhere, it had negative impacts in the image. But by using the masking tool and really isolating the effects of those on specific parts of the image, I found that I can go a little bit farther and use slightly higher settings than I would have in the past.
12:55 All right, so the rock face is looking good. I'm going to drop the blacks a little bit. I want to keep some of that drama, that contrast in there. So we'll keep some of the blacks down. That looks pretty good. So let's hit done. And there we go. So now we're at a point in the image where I like to step back from an image.
13:17 And there's a couple of ways that I'll do that. One is to literally just step away and get away from the image for an hour or for a day, let my eyes come back to it fresh and see what I want to do. Another way that I can do that sometimes is just by zooming out.
13:30 So if I go over to the navigator and select a level, you can pick different levels depending on the image. I want to really zoom out on this one and kind of step back and see where is my eye drawn in this image and is it drawn to the right places. For example, in this image, to me the subject is the rock face, but there's a lot of distracting elements in the foreground.
13:52 You've got this bright spot over here on the right hand side and even this field of trees tends to draw my eye away a little bit. So I want to address those things. All right, so let's do that with some more masking. And I can open up the mask tool and let's add some more masks.
14:06 So the first one that I'll add is a gradient, a linear gradient. And I'll come down to the right hand side and I'll drag up a gradient kind of on an angle here. Now most of the time when I'm making adjustments like this, it can be very simple. Just a small exposure adjustment of maybe a third of a stop or so is frequently all you need to make an adjustment.
14:30 In this case, I might bring the highlights down as well just to take the edge off. I don't want my change to look too unrealistic, so I'll limit my changes there. Now the next thing that I want to do is address this field. So to do that, let's create a radial gradient. So I'll click radial gradient and we'll draw here.
14:48 Now my radial is kind of going off the image, so let me make an adjustment here and pull the image back so I can see the gradient, especially the controls that are off screen. Now I can rotate it to kind of cover the space I'm looking at, get it wide enough. One of the nice new features about the radial gradient is you can now visually see the feather and where that feather is going to take place.
15:20 So you have some control over that. That's really nice. Okay, so I'll make some adjustments here, get this into the place I want, and then once it's there I can make a very small adjustment to exposure. I'm just going to type in negative dot three three, so down a third of a stop.
15:37 I'll do that pretty frequently just to, I like those stop, half stop increments. They tend to work really well for me. And so now that's looking pretty good. That's really diminished that edge, that my eye was being pulled to those bottom parts of the image. It kind of draws me back up to the rock a little bit.
15:53 So I like those changes. One more change I think I'll make, maybe a couple more, is I want to diminish this tree a little bit. I like the tree, but it's very dominant in the image. So we'll do another radial gradient and I'll start at the base and draw up and then I will simply drop the exposure by a third of a stop.
16:14 Okay, I think I want to add a little bit more drama to the left side here. So I'm going to do another radial gradient into this dark area here. I think I'll rotate this a little bit. And so I want to kind of capture the dark area and some of this ramp up the hill and I'm going to drop the exposure here by a third of a stop as well.
16:44 Negative dot three three. Okay, and that'll help bring the focus in a little bit more. Now that I've done that, I want maybe a little bit more contrast in this mountain face. So I'm going to come back to mask number two, which was my subject. And I think I'm going to drop the blacks a little bit more.
17:03 There we go. Okay, that blends better. Okay, so now I can look at my image zoomed out to make sure that it has the right balance of tones that I'm looking for and I can look at it full screen. Now let me take a look at the before and after. So I'll click the before and after view.
17:23 I'm going to hit the tab key to get rid of my sidebars. Now you can see what the before and after image looks like. So on the left, we have the image before we've set the white balance, before we've shifted the temperature to get a good white balance, and before we've swapped colors.
17:36 And then on the right, you can see that we've made those corrections. We've swapped the colors and made additional changes to the image. And this is the resulting image. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography journey, please consider liking, subscribing, or leaving a comment. Do you have a question related to infrared photography?
17:57 Leave a comment below. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.
Can Lightroom Swap Color Channels?
Not with its own settings. Lightroom Classic has no channel mixer, so no control moves the red channel into blue and the blue channel into red. The HSL and Calibration panels shift hues, not channels. A local hue adjustment of 180 degrees gets you a blue sky by rotating hues rather than swapping channels.
Lightroom can apply a channel swap that’s built into a profile. An enhanced profile can carry a LUT, and a LUT can hold the same channel mixer adjustment you would make in Photoshop. Pick the profile, and Lightroom swaps the colors with no round trip to Photoshop and no extra TIFF or PSD files. You can build these profiles yourself, or order the Lightroom Infrared Color Swap Profiles, which are built for your camera model and combine the white balance shift and the color swap in a single profile. They also work in Lightroom and Lightroom mobile.
What You Need
Lightroom Classic and a raw infrared file.
An infrared camera profile for your camera. The free Infrared Profile Pack has profiles for 496 cameras.
Open the image in the Develop module and go to the Basic panel.
Use the White Balance Selector. Press W and click a neutral subject. Clouds are my favorite target. With Lightroom’s default profile, the clouds stay tinted, and the Temp slider stops at its lowest value, 2,000 K. Infrared needs a lower color temperature than Lightroom’s scale allows.
Apply an infrared profile. Open the Profile Browser and choose Infrared Temp -50 or Infrared Temp -100 from the Infrared Profile Pack. These profiles shift the color temperature so the white balance range reaches infrared. I used the -100 profile for this image.
Click the neutral subject again. Press W and click the clouds. Now the clouds are white, the sky is yellow, and the trees are blue. If the Temp slider lands on exactly 2,000 or 50,000, switch to the other profile and click again.
No clouds? Gravel, concrete, sidewalks, and roads all work as neutral targets. With a 720 nm or deeper filter, you can also white balance on trees or grass. For more on choosing a target, see White Balance for Infrared Photography.
After white balance with the Infrared Temp -100 profile: white clouds, a yellow sky, and blue trees.
Step 2: Choose How to Handle Color
You have three options once the white balance is set.
Option 1: Keep the Infrared Colors
A color swap is a creative choice, not a requirement.
Option 2: Swap Colors in Photoshop
Right-click the image and choose Edit In > Edit in Adobe Photoshop. Swap the channels with a Channel Mixer adjustment layer, or run my free Photoshop actions for infrared, which do it in one click. The full process is in How to Edit Infrared Photos with Photoshop. This adds a TIFF or PSD to your catalog.
Option 3: Swap Colors in Lightroom with a Color Swap Profile
Open the Profile Browser in the Basic panel and expand IR Color Swap -50 or IR Color Swap -100, whichever matches the temperature shift that worked in Step 1. The IR Color Swap group holds the original six styles.
Pick a swap style. Each style handles the channels differently. In the video, I compare the original six: Hue (rotates every hue 180 degrees), Invert, and four channel mixer styles that swap red and blue and treat the green channel differently. The set now has 28 styles.
If you select a profile with the matching temperature shift (-50 or -100), the white balance will match, and there is no need to change it. Optionally, you can tweak the white balance to adjust your colors.
I used Split for this image.
Step 3: Crop
Press R to open the Crop tool. I cropped in from the right to put the focus on the rock face. Press R again or click Done to apply the crop.
Step 4: Make Global Adjustments
Basic panel: lower Exposure slightly and raise Contrast.
Tone Curve: choose the Medium Contrast point curve for more punch.
HSL panel, Luminance tab: use the targeted adjustment tool to darken the trees. Darker trees also look a little more saturated. Raise their saturation slightly in the Saturation tab if needed.
Leave the sky alone for now. It gets its own mask in the next step.
Step 5: Mask the Sky
I now do far less in the Basic panel and far more with masks, because masks let me push settings in one area without damaging another.
Open Masking and choose Select Sky. It works best after the color swap, when the sky is blue and the clouds are white. On an unswapped image with a yellow sky, Select Sky can miss.
Raise Dehaze. Dehaze adds a lot of contrast, which is often too much on the ground but looks great in the sky.
Raise Saturation slightly to strengthen the blue.
Step 6: Mask the Subject
Add a new mask with Select Subject. It’s hit-or-miss with landscapes, but here it picked out the rock face even though it was very dark.
Raise Shadows substantially to brighten the rock face.
Raise Texture and Clarity to bring out the rock detail.
Lower Blacks slightly to keep some contrast and drama.
I keep Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze low globally because they help one part of the image and hurt another. Inside a mask, I can use higher values than I ever would on the whole image.
Step 7: Step Back and Guide the Eye
Look at the image fresh. Walk away for an hour or a day, or zoom out with the Navigator panel. Then ask where your eye goes. In this image, the subject is the rock face, but a bright spot on the lower right and a field of trees pull the eye away.
Linear Gradient for the bright corner. Drag a gradient up from the lower right at an angle. Lower Exposure by about a third of a stop, and lower Highlights to soften the edges. Keep it subtle so the change doesn’t look unrealistic.
Radial Gradient for the field. Draw it over the field, rotate it to fit, and adjust the feather. Then type -0.33 into Exposure, a third of a stop down. I use third-stop and half-stop changes most of the time.
Radial Gradient for the tree. The tree was too dominant, so I drew another radial from its base and dropped it a third of a stop.
Radial Gradient for the dark area on the left. One more at -0.33 adds drama and keeps the focus on the rock face.
Revisit earlier masks. I went back to the Select Subject mask and lowered Blacks a little more so it blended better.
Step 8: Compare Before and After
Press Y for the before-and-after view, and Tab to hide the side panels. The before image is the raw file before the white balance, the temperature shift, and the color swap.
After: white balanced, color swapped with the Split profile, and finished with masks, all in Lightroom Classic.
