InfraRed Photography Preset

This download is for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Should be compatible in any version that supports white balance and split toning, guaranteed to work in LR2+

To Install this preset, it should be pretty straight forward, Drag it to:
/Adobe/Lightroom/Develop Presets.

Find this folder on Windows:
c:/Program Files/

Find this folder on Macintosh:
/[YOU]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom
^{Where [YOU] is the name of your home directory, user dependent.}

This preset WILL NOT WORK (properly) on JPEG images, it must be used on RAW files. This preset WILL NOT give you blue skies and pink foliage, you must use my InfraRed Photography Action for PhotoShop to get that.



I do not require to be credited for either this preset or the action as it's simple and easy enough to reproduce. The Photoshop Action can be easily looked up anywhere, the develop preset for lightroom may be the first of its kind however. But still! No need to credit!

Okay. So you're asking. Why is this preset important? Why doesn't it work properly on JPEG's? I'll explain.

RAW keeps a White Balance value between 2,000 (BLUE, COOL/COLD) & 50,000 (RED, WARM/HOT). While this is adequate for all situations, it isn't for infrared.

Infrared is on the red end of the spectrum so there is abnormally more red light than any other colour. If you take a long exposure at night with a digital camera that sky will usually turn red (as a result of trace amount of infrared light hitting the censor).

Counting left to right, top to bottom on the preview image above. The first image was captured using auto white balance, so a temperature value of about 6,000K was used to get natural looking whites in a visual spectrum photograph which the camera assumes I'm taking; But it appears that a temperature of 30,000K was used due to the colour aspect of the photo. But since I'm taking an infrared photograph, a custom white balance should be applied.

The Third image has a custom white balance applied. On the camera the photo looked similar to photos number two and four, except Camera RAW doesn't recognize temperature values lower than 2,000K so any blue that was in the image was gone when loaded into lightroom.

JPEG's, can store that lower temperature value that RAW can't, however you can not change it later with the same freedom that RAW provides. So taking infrared photos in JPEG means you'll be able to store that custom white balance a lot easier.

I take both RAW&JPEG with my IR's. Why? In PhotoShop I set the blending layer of the JPEG over the RAW as "Color," this lightens the overall scene (IR RAW's tend to be lighter than the JPEGs) l and keeps the JPEG colours. I still get the RAW image close as I can to the JPEG because this method isn't always the best option.