No single white balance setting works for infrared photography. No Kelvin value works for every image. The right setting depends on your camera sensor, your infrared filter, the lighting, and the look you want. In color infrared, white balance is a color-mapping tool: you use it to separate the sky from the foliage, so the color swap that follows has something to work with.
In practice:
Shoot raw and set white balance while editing. Setting it in camera is optional, but it can help you preview your image.
Click a neutral subject with the white balance picker. Clouds, pavement, rocks, dirt, and tree bark all work. Use grass or foliage only if you are using a 720 nm filter and want white foliage.
Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Camera Raw need a custom profile to reach infrared’s low color temperature. The free Infrared Profile Pack provides one for over 400 cameras.
Judge the result by the balance between sky and foliage, not by the number on the Temp slider.
Why Infrared Needs a Different White Balance
The white balance controls in most raw editors are built for visible light. They cover color temperatures from 2,000 to 50,000 Kelvin. Infrared light sits around 900 Kelvin, below that scale. With a 590 nm, 665 nm, or 720 nm filter, clicking a neutral subject in these editors leaves a red cast, because the Temp slider stops at 2,000 K.
These raw editors need a custom profile to set a good white balance on color infrared images:
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom Classic
Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw
DxO PhotoLab 8
Exposure X
Skylum Luminar Neo
These set a good white balance without one: Capture One, darktable, ON1 Photo RAW, Photomator, Pixelmator Pro, RawTherapee, and Serif Affinity Photo 2. For a full comparison, see Raw Editors for Infrared Photography.
Download: The free Infrared Profile Pack contains color temperature shifting profiles for hundreds of cameras. These profiles allow you to set a good white balance in Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop Camera Raw, and other raw editors. Alternatively, you can create your own DNG Camera Profile for your camera.
The profiles shift the color temperature scale, so the Temp values no longer represent actual Kelvin. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that the slider can now reach a white balance that gives you a golden sky, white clouds, and blue foliage. For the installation steps and why the old DNG Profile Editor is no longer a good option, see White Balancing Color Infrared Photography. To choose between the profiles, see Which infrared profile should I use?
In Camera or While Editing?
Shooting raw: set white balance while editing. You can adjust it in Kelvin, try several targets, and change your mind later. Setting it in camera can help you preview your composition, but it isn’t required.
Shooting JPEG: set a custom white balance in camera. A JPEG’s white balance controls are far less flexible than a raw file’s, so get close to the look you want before you shoot. This matters most with converted point-and-shoot cameras that can’t save raw files. If you forgot, the curves method below can still rescue a JPEG.
Auto white balance in your editor is designed for visible light and rarely works on infrared images, though it can work surprisingly well in RawTherapee or Pixelmator.
What to Click
Pick something that should look neutral in the finished image. Each choice separates colors differently, so try a few and keep the one you like.
Clouds are the favorite target. They usually separate the sky from the foliage well. Thin clouds are close to the sky’s color, though, and push the sky toward white and the foliage toward strong color.
Pavement, roads, sidewalks, concrete, and gravel give an even blend.
Tree bark is a good target when there’s no sky. Bark in the shade and bark in the sun look different.
Dirt and mud are often the most neutral things in a landscape.
Rocks, sand, and surf work well at the coast. The shaded and sunlit sides of a rock give slightly different results.
Buildings, signs, metal, wood, and benches work in towns and interiors.
Grass and foliage work best with a 720 nm filter when you desire white foliage.
On overcast days, you won’t get the vivid colors of full sun. Stick with something close to white, like clouds or structures.
590 nm and 665 nm: clouds, pavement, rocks, or bark. Grass will not produce the best color separation.
720 nm: clouds work, but grass gives the best result when you desire white foliage.
800 nm and deeper (black and white): white balance only changes exposure and contrast. You’re better off using the exposure, contrast, and tone curve controls, which are designed for that.
Picking a white balance on an unswapped image means imagining what the colors will look like after the swap. Color swap profiles remove the guesswork: the profile applies the color swap, so you see your final colors while you click and drag. The LR IR Color Swap Profiles do this in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom mobile, with a -50 or -100 temperature shift for each swap style.
In Lightroom Classic, you can also hover the white balance picker over the image and watch the Navigator preview before you click.
If the Temp slider lands on exactly 2,000 or 50,000, you’ve hit the end of the scale. Switch to a profile with the other temperature shift (for example, from Infrared Temp -100 to Infrared Temp -50) and click again.
Secrets 1: The White Balance Picker
The first video covers the common misconceptions, then sets the white balance on many real images: landscapes, overcast days, coastlines, cities, interiors, and portraits. It shows how each target changes the separation between sky and foliage.
Secrets 2: Answers to Your White Balance Questions
This follow-up answers the most common questions: why white balance matters, whether to do it in camera or in editing, which editors work best, whether white balance matters for black and white and full spectrum, and how color balance tools help with mixed lighting. It then sets the white balance on 590 nm and 720 nm images with color swap profiles.
Secrets 3: Curves, Without White Balance Tools
You can white balance an image without a profile and without touching color temperature. This rescues a JPEG shot with the wrong white balance. It’s shown in Photoshop, but any editor with curves and a channel mixer can do it.
Add a Curves adjustment layer. Above it, add a Channel Mixer layer that swaps red and blue, so you can judge the final colors while you work: in the Red output channel, set Red to 0% and Blue to 100%; in the Blue output channel, set Blue to 0% and Red to 100%.
In Curves, work in the individual channels. In the Green and Blue channels, drag the bottom handle to where the histogram’s signal fades out. Watch the clouds: they’re white when the image is balanced.
To improve it, split the Green output channel in the Channel Mixer: 50% Red, 0% Green, and 50% Blue. The green channel’s curve no longer has any effect.
Back in Curves, fine-tune the Blue channel until the clouds are white. Going further adds color to the foliage but starts to blow out the highlights.
Optionally, open Filter > Camera Raw Filter to lower Highlights and raise Shadows, then tweak the Blue curve once more.
This doesn’t replace profiles and the Temp slider, which still give better results. It’s a fallback.
0:00 Can you white balance any infrared image without profiles? Can you white balance without even adjusting the color temperature? I'll show you how. Maybe you've mistakenly shot an image in JPEG and forgot to set a custom white balance. Or maybe your camera only shoots JPEG. Regardless of the reason, let's white
0:21 balance an image without white balance tools. I'll do this in Photoshop, but you can replicate this effect in many editors. Here's an image that I've shot with a 590 nanometer filter. This was shot in JPEG and it had a daylight white balance. So very red, this actually kind of reminds me, when I first started shooting
0:43 infrared, this is what the images looked like. All right, so let's get started on transforming this into a good infrared image. So the first thing that I'm going to do in my layers panel is I'm going to come down to the adjustment layers and I'm going to set a curves layer. So we'll add that to the layers panel curves. Before I
1:03 make any adjustments to that, let's add one more adjustment layer. I want to swap the colors because I'm going to need to be eyeballing the white balance. And so I need to swap colors. That'll give me a better way to do that. So let's go down to the adjustment layers and we will select channel mixer. The channel mixer will
1:22 allow me to swap the colors and then I'll be seeing my final colors. I'll get a better idea of what this looks like. Okay, so in properties, I'm going to go to the output channel red. We're going to change the red output channel red to zero and blue to 100. And then we'll go down to the blue output channel. We'll set blue to
1:42 100, red to 100 and blue to zero. Okay, so now I've swapped my colors. Now I get a better impression of what my final colors will look like. That'll help me to eyeball my white balance. Let's go back to layers. And now I'm going to start working in this curves layer. So let me hit the properties on the curves layer and
2:03 we'll start making some adjustments in curves. Just like the channel mixer, we're going to use the RGB color channels in curves the same as we had the RGB color channels in the channel mixer. Instead of the one channel here that affects all of them, we'll get out into the individual channels. So here we have our red channel,
2:24 we have a green channel. You'll notice that this channel doesn't quite fill up the space. And so what I want to do is I want to better use the curve in the green channel. And so I'll do that by grabbing this handle down here at the bottom and dragging it somewhere around the bottom of the histogram where the signal sort of
2:47 fades off. The signal really fades off here, but kind of near up here near the bottom, we'll get it kind of in this range. And then while I'm doing that, I'm going to be eyeballing the image to take a look at the clouds because ultimately that's my gauge for when this is white balanced is when my clouds are white. Okay,
3:05 so I've taken a shot at the green channel here. Let's go to the blue channel and the blue channel we can do the same thing. So I'm going to drag this slider at the bottom towards the bottom of the histogram where the signal ends, if you will. And while I'm going to do that, I can drag back and forth and I'm looking at these
3:22 clouds over here to see are they too magenta? Are they too blue? Where is a good middle ground? Kind of eyeball this and go back and forth till I get the look that I want. And I could go back and forth with the green and the blue channel to get this to the point where I like. This is not bad, but I think I can get a little bit
3:43 better. So let's make a change to the channel mixer to improve this. So I'm going to go back to the channel mixer. I'll double click the properties. That'll take me to my properties tab. And now I want to start making adjustments. So let's go to the output channel green. This finicky green channel, I want to get rid of it. I
4:00 want to make it go away. But if I make the green channel go away and just zero it out, now my colors are going to get all crazy. So I can't just make it go away. I've got to send it somewhere else. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to split it between the red and the blue channels. So I'll put 50% of the green into red and
4:18 I'll put 50% of the green into blue. Okay, you can see that that made a pretty dramatic change to the image. Now the foliage is a little bit more white, the sky and the clouds are a little bit more bluish. So now let's go back into curves and see what we can do from here. So in curves, I'll go back and click properties. This
4:38 will take me back into the properties for curves. And I'm going to look at each individual layer again. Let's start with the red layer. Now the red layer is pretty good in infrared because we've captured a lot of red. So not many adjustments here. I might make a little tweak to the bottom here. Again, I'm eyeballing the image to
4:54 see what the effect is. I'm not going to make any changes to the top. Let's go to the green channel and the green channel. Remember we eliminated the green channel in the channel mixer. So now if I make adjustments to the green channel, they don't do anything, nothing happens. So this is now irrelevant. I've made the green
5:12 channel irrelevant. Let's go down to the blue channel and we can make some adjustments again. So I'm going to do two things. I'm going to be adjusting the slider, but I'm going to be looking at these clouds over here to try to get them to be white. So little two blue here. I get a nice white color the farther I go.
5:31 And there's a bit of a balancing act here because the farther I go left, the more white I get and the more color that I get in the foliage, which is really nice. But I start to blow out the highlights a little bit. So try to find a little bit of a balancing act here for when that looks good. Let's stop here. This is not bad. What
5:48 else could I do to improve this image? Let me go back to layers and I want to click on my background and I'm going to make an adjustment to the highlights and shadows. So let's go into filter and select camera raw. Now some of you are saying, oh Rob, you're just going to open camera raw. So you can adjust the color
6:05 temperature. No, no, no. I'm not touching the color temperature. We're going to leave that alone. We're just going to adjust the highlights. We'll drag those down to zero and the shadows and kick those up. That'll give us a little bit more tonal range in this image. All right, I'll hit okay. And we'll go back to our image
6:23 and there we go. We've got a much nicer range of colors and tonality that appears in this image. And actually my clouds are pretty white now. I've got a pretty good look there. I could go back into curves at this point and go down to my blue channel. And I could tweak this a little bit to find the exact balance I'm looking
6:42 for. Get those clouds white, get the right amount of color in the image. And that's looking pretty good. So I'm pretty happy with how this image turned out. So is this my perfect workflow? Is this going to replace the use of profiles and color temperature? No, of course not. You're still going to get better results using
7:04 those tools. But on occasion, if you have to use this kind of a method, maybe to make a tweak, or maybe you accidentally shot an image in JPEG, or you forgot to set the right white balance while doing that, there are ways that you can adjust the white balance using other than white balance tools and still get pretty good
7:23 results. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography journey, like, subscribe, or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.
Secrets 4: Manual and Histogram, With No Neutral Subject
When nothing in the image is neutral, set the white balance by hand.
Apply an Infrared Temp -50 profile so the Temp slider reaches low enough.
Try the picker on whatever is closest to neutral. If none of the results look right, drag the Temp slider instead. Too far left favors the foliage; too far right favors the sky. Stop where neither dominates.
Or set it from the Histogram: drag the Temp slider until the red, green, and blue peaks roughly line up on top of each other. It lands close to where your eye does.
It works the same with color swap profiles, and the swapped colors make the balance easier to see. There’s no perfect setting in infrared. A clean separation between the sky and foliage colors usually gives the best result.
0:00 How do you white balance in color infrared photography when there are no good neutral subjects? Let's take a look at a tricky white balance situation how you can set a good white balance manually and how the Histogram can help with white balance. This image was shot with a 590 nanometer filter.
0:19 So as I look to set a white balance here, the first thing I'm going to do is change my profile. So we'll go from a standard profile from my camera to infrared temp negative 50. This will allow me to set color temperature values that are lower than normal. So if I use the white balance picker, I'll grab that.
0:38 I don't have my normal subjects. I do have some clouds here in the background and some other neutral areas. Let's examine some of those and see what they look like. We'll start with the clouds. If I click on the clouds, you'll see the clouds are very thin in the background, so they're very close to the sky color, which is
0:53 going to skew the sky towards white, which is going to make the foliage very colorful. So that's not exactly what I'm looking for. Let's hit the W key and try a patch on the ground here. We'll see what that looks like. This gives me a little bit better of a balance. I've got a little less strong color in the blue
1:13 foliage and a little bit more in the gold sky. Let's do one more sample on the post here and we'll see what this looks like. This is going to reduce the color in the foliage and increase the color in the sky. So I'm not really fully happy with any of these. can I do to find a good white balance?
1:30 The main thing that I want to accomplish with a white balance is a balance between the colors in the sky and the colors in the foliage. So let's go over to our temp slider and we will navigate dragging that back and forth. And what I'm going to do is slide back and forth. I'm looking at the image and what I'm doing is
1:46 I'm looking for a balance between the colors. So if I go too far to the left, that's going to overly favor the foliage. If I go too far to the right, that's going to overly favor the sky and I'm looking for a balance between the two. So somewhere in here is about what I'm looking at.
2:05 Now another way that you can do this is that you can look at the histogram up in this area. Notice that currently with when I have this white balance that I kind of like the value of the piles of pixels up here in the histogram as we've got the blue, green and red pixels. They're all kind of here centered in the middle of the image.
2:26 Now let's watch the histogram as I make adjustments to the temperature slider. If I go to the low end of the scale that is going to shift color towards the blue, you can see a bit askew. The blues are skewing high and the reds are skewing low off of the greens in the center of the histogram.
2:45 If I drag the temperature slider to the right to get an extreme over there, we're going to see the opposite. Now we've got reds in the highlights and blues in the shadows. So one of the things that I could do is look for a balance of colors in my histogram to try to set a good white balance.
3:03 So this time I'm going to set a white balance by looking at the histogram and not looking at the image. So let's drag our value down and I'm going to take a look at the histogram. I want to get gauge but I'm roughly looking for those reds and the greens to kind of land right on top of each other.
3:19 So if I do that, I'm going to end up here. That's pretty close to where I was previously. So we can, we can use a manual adjustment in the slider And we can look at the histogram to see that we have our colors roughly aligned. Now let's swap the colors and see if we can get a feel for the same process with our colors swapped.
3:37 So let's open up the profile browser over here and we will go down to the IR color swap negative 50 group. I want to match the temperature that I already have and I'm going to go down and pick the swap profile. So this will just give me a straight red blue swap of my colors. So we can close this and now we can go through the same exercise
3:57 but with the color swapped and it might be a little bit easier to see the impact. So if I white balance on the clouds, grab my white balance picker on the clouds, now you can see that there's a lot more color in the foliage and the sky is a bit muted. I hit my W key and go down into the dirt and select in here.
4:17 Now the white balance is favoring towards the foliage but that makes the sky extremely blue. And if I use the W key and select the post, that's even worse. So clearly I've got the same problems here but it's a little easier to see now that I've swapped my colors. Let's go through the same process.
4:35 I will look at the image and I'll try to eyeball the image again looking for a balance between the colors in the foliage and the colors in the sky. So I don't want either one to completely dominate the other. So I'm going to look somewhere in maybe this range and of course no surprise the values are pretty similar to what we had previously.
4:56 The values are no longer Kelvin because of our shift in color temperature but that doesn't matter I can still use the values to try to get a gauge of where I'm at. that's one view of it. Now if I do the same thing with the histogram, let's look at the histogram in this case when I go to the low side
5:11 going to see that reds become shifted to the highlights, the blues become shifted to the lower end and if I shift to the far right side of the scale it's the opposite. You can see that our three primary colors no longer line up. Now I can use the histogram to try to line these up and get them close together.
5:31 So this time I'm looking at the histogram and I'm trying to get these kind of piled together again. This is a imperfect sort of of science here but again I'm just looking to for to roughly gauge these three primary colors in the histogram and get them lined up. So when I do that I end up about
5:47 34-3500 so pretty close to where I was before. Let's do it one more time with a more extreme profile. We'll go into the profile browser and this time I'm going to select the purple profile. So this one's going to be a more extreme set of colors that you you might not use frequently in infrared but I
6:06 think could suit this image of these grapevines. Let's go through the same process. So we'll grab the white balance picker, we select the clouds, again the sky becomes muted, the foliage is a little too strong. Hit my W key and select the mud so now the sky is too strong foliage is muted and finally if I white
6:28 balance on the post then it's even more extreme. So let's go to our manual process of grabbing the slider and looking at the image trying to find a balance between those greens and purples. Whichever though there's no there's no exact white balance setting that is that is perfect in infrared
6:46 you're really looking for the best results for your image for me I find that that's frequently a clean balance separation between the sky color and the foliage color. So the values don't mean much except as a little bit of a gauge here so I can go back and forth till I get to this point where I feel
7:03 Somewhere in here is a good balance between the sky and the foliage. See I've got the same values here and I can do the same thing with the histogram. Let's look at the histogram. If I drag to the left on the temp slider now you can see it's the green that really stands out with this particular profile.
7:18 Each profile is going to be a little bit different in how it affects the colors and if I go to the right now that green has shifted the highlights of the image. So again I want to get those reds blues and greens all lined up and that will allow me to manually set a white balance for this image.
7:35 So now I'm looking at the histogram and I'm trying to get those three primary colors all roughly kind of on top of each other and so right in there that gets me a good value again pretty close to 3500. So that's going to be a good white balance for this particular image. If you'd like to learn more about infrared photography check out my new
7:56 course, Mastering infrared photography in Lightroom. It contains nearly four hours of lessons covering everything you need to edit infrared images. A similar course for Lightroom classic will be available in a few weeks. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography
8:13 journey like, subscribe or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.
