White Foliage Infrared
By Rob Shea
Learn how to get white foliage in your infrared photography. This covers color and black & white with multiple infrared filters, including 850, 830, 780, 750, 720, 665, 590, and 550 nm. We’ll review white balance techniques, editing techniques, and a shortcut for multiple raw editors. I’ll demonstrate using Lightroom Classic, but these techniques can be replicated in many editors.
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Transcript for How to get White Foliage in Infrared Photography. Duration: 9:31.
- 0:00 How do you get white foliage in infrared photography? Let's walk through a variety of ways. I'll cover using different infrared filters, white balancing, editing techniques, and a shortcut for multiple editors. I'll demonstrate using Lightroom Classic, but these techniques can be done in many editors.
- 0:19 The easiest way to get white foliage in your infrared photography is to use an 830 nanometer or higher filter. Because foliage reflects infrared light instead of absorbing it, this produces the brightest white color in your foliage. Of course, you will have a monochrome image as well because we're
- 0:38 only capturing infrared light and no visible light. So for the brightest whites, use an 830 nanometer or higher filter to capture only infrared light. Next, we'll look at techniques involving a 720, 750, or 780 nanometer filter. Images shot with these filters can be processed as a monochrome or color.
- 1:03 Let's look at both. Here we have an image shot with a 780 nanometer filter. So if I switch to the black and white treatment, well then obviously this is the most straightforward approach because the colors are gone and now all of my foliage is a bright white. So that's the quick way to go is to go monochrome.
- 1:20 But let's say I want to do it in color. So I'll turn off black and white and let me select a temperature shifting profile. We'll go with temp 100. I'll click my white balance selector and we'll click on the trees. That didn't work very well. My white balance is capped out at 50,000.
- 1:39 So let me switch to my other profile. We'll try that. Then we'll use the white balance on the trees.
- 1:46 There we go. The way that I can tell that this works is because I have white foliage and I have a very soft gold sky. This technique only works well with these 700 range filters because otherwise there's going to be too much visible light. These 720 to 780 nanometer filters will capture mostly infrared
- 2:08 light and just a sliver of red light, just enough that we can white balance on the foliage to make the foliage white. That allows us to get the look we're looking for. If you use a lower numbered filter, you're going to be allowing too much visible light and we'll need to use a different technique.
- 2:24 You won't be able to white balance directly on the foliage. Okay, so I've got my white foliage set. Let's do a quick color swap. I'll pick a profile. We'll go in this negative 50 group and I'll pick a profile that gives me the sky color that I'm looking for. This first one looks pretty good.
- 2:42 There we go, Amber. All right, so I've got a nice colored sky and I've got my white foliage. So this is how we get white foliage with 720, 750 and 780 nanometer filters. Now something to be aware of is not all 720 nanometer filters are created equal. Some will actually have a good cutoff at that range, but some will
- 3:03 transmit more visible light than you realize. Let's look at what we can do when that's the case. Here I have an image shot with a, in this case it was an STC optics 720 nanometer filter. This filter tends to let in a little bit more light. It kind of acts a little bit more like a 665.
- 3:21 So let's see what happens. If I white balance, I've got my infrared temp negative 100. Let's white balance on the foliage and the number's good. My range is good. And so I've set a white balance, but you may be able to notice that there's still hints of baby blue in here with some filters, even
- 3:39 though there are 720 and you think you should be able to white balance on the foliage directly. If the transmission slope is sort of shallow and allows more visible light in, as opposed to being a really strong cutoff between visible and infrared light, you may have to look at the other techniques.
- 3:55 So we'll cover what to do in the next section. Now let's talk about infrared images shot with a 550, 590 or 665 nanometer filter and what we can do to make the foliage white. Of course, this will also apply to those cases where you've got a not so great 720 nanometer filter that's letting in too much visible light.
- 4:15 So let's start by white balancing our image. I'm going to change my profile to infrared temp negative 100. We'll grab the picker and we will white balance on the clouds. That's a really good white balance. I've got white clouds, I've got a gold sky and I've got this baby blue foliage.
- 4:32 Let's go ahead and swap our colors before we do anything else. So I'll go down into my profiles. I'm going to open up the negative 100 group and we'll pick a profile. In this case, we'll just pick amber again. That looks pretty good. I like the sky color. Again, we're going to try to make the foliage white.
- 4:48 So we'll close that out and okay, now we're ready to make our adjustment. And the way that we're going to do this with a highly colorful image like this is in the color mixer. So I'm going to close down the basic panel and we'll open up the color mixer. Now with the color mixer, if I know the colors that I'm working
- 5:06 with, I could just grab them, click saturation and drag them down. But of course I did a color swap. So the colors here that I've got may not match the actual colors in the image. Let's go ahead and grab this little selection tool and I will point to the foliage. I've got saturation selected.
- 5:26 I've got this tool picked. Now I'm going to click on the tree and then I'm going to drag down. And you'll notice if we look over here that the blue has been dragged all the way to negative 100. The aqua is negative 13. You could also, if you wanted to, you could drag the aqua down as well.
- 5:44 Maybe if you've got some fringing around some of the image and you want to get all of it white, then you can drag that down that way. So as you can see, that did a pretty good job of removing all the color saturation and making the foliage white. In this case, the white is not going to be quite as bright as it
- 6:01 would be if I had used a, of course, a 800 range filter or a 700 range filter. So the whiteness is going to be a little darker compared to those filters. But you could then also come over to luminance and I know that I've affected the blue and aqua. So I could drag those up and increase the brightness here.
- 6:22 So now I'm sort of mirroring the effect of what it would look like to have shot this with a different filter. I've got the colorful foliage is now white and I've used the luminance to increase the brightness so it pops a little bit more. Let me reset these changes and we'll try one more technique for removing these colors.
- 6:43 So we'll clear out the aqua luminance, aqua and voluminance will clear out the saturation and now we're going to try this in point color. It's going to be a little bit more involved in point color and I'll show you why. I'll click on my picker and now remember in this case I'm selecting
- 6:59 a single color, whereas in the color mixer you're selecting you know a range of all the blues. But now we're going to select a very specific color. So let's make this selection. So we have hue, saturation, luminance. I can take the saturation and I'll drag this all the way down and
- 7:17 you can see it gets rid of much of the color but it doesn't get rid of all of the color and that's because of the range that we're working with. I could expand out the range either by using the slider or by getting into the details below expanding that out and making these adjustments and widen out the adjustment.
- 7:36 But at this point now you're probably just you know treating this like the color mixer and it might just be easier to have done this in the color mixer. Another thing that you could do is simply select another point. I found that if you select two or three points and then reduce the
- 7:50 saturation, now you can see it's really eliminated that color. And let's just do a third one for good measure. I'll just pick another random spot in here and then we will drag this down and so now I've removed all the color and I could do the same thing. I could increase the luminance this way to increase it.
- 8:08 So you could also do this in point color if you like but I think it's a little bit easier in the color mixer. All right let me clear these settings and we'll show you the easiest way to get white foliage in a ton of different editors. So I'm going to delete all swatches. Now we're back to normal.
- 8:24 What's that easy method? You can just use a profile or a preset depending on your program. So if I go into basic and I come down into my profiles, I'm going to go down into my profile browser and we'll go to the bottom and the profile at the bottom is white. There we go. One click and it's done.
- 8:42 I now have white foliage. In Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop you could use the Lightroom infrared color swap profiles. In ON1 you can use the ON1 photo raw presets and then for other programs you could use my pro infrared LUTs and this could cover video editors or any other editor that supports LUTs.
- 9:03 What is your favorite technique for getting white foliage in infrared? Let us know in the comments. If you'd like to learn more about infrared photography, check out my new courses. Courses for Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are now available. Courses for Photoshop, Camera Raw and more are coming soon.
- 9:22 A link is in the description. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography journey, like, subscribe or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.
