Infrared Photography and Processing

Hey, what's up guys? Professional outdoor photographer David Johnston here and today we're talking about infrared photography. Now I'm coming to you from a local park near my home in Tennessee and really, you can get bogged down with the creative process in outdoor photography. Really bored with the whole process and that's where infrared comes in because you can create other worldly scenes with your outdoor photography using just a couple steps. And if you ever heard of infrared photography, you know that it can get expensive, but you can also do it with the camera that you already have.

We're just going to go through a few very simple steps that you can take in this video, to create your own infrared photography. First up, we're going to get into the camera and see exactly what we're dealing with here. So, just to show you what we're photographing today, I have this path lined up that's going to be on the left side of the frame of my image, and then I'm going to use that pathway as a leading line to these southern pines. And then on the right top quadrant of the frame, I'm going to be using the deep, blue, rich sky with this crazy cloud formation here that we have. And, infrared really requires sunny conditions.

Really bright sun and also some really bright foliage. So you want to stick to like spring and summer time for these type of photos. And you also want to angle yourself to where the sunlight is hitting your features so they really light up with color, rather than being in the shadow. So I'm shooting this scene at 1/80 of a second, ISO 100 and f/16. And I'm also using a sunlight white balance which is very important for doing infrared with the DSLR, or mirrorless camera that you already have, getting that white balance correct in the field.

Now a lot of the work is going to come in in the post processing aspect which we're going to get into next, first lets take this shot and see how it comes out. Creating an infrared effect in post processing is actually very simple. We're going to be using Lightroom, and the first thing you need to do is switch your photo over to black and white. This is going to take color tones out of it, but still remain the black and white mix tones that we have. Next thing you want to do is increase your yellow and green tones all the way.

This is going to create that infrared effect on the yellows and greens that are within your black and white. It creates more of a highlighted effect within those colors. Next thing, decrease your blue slider all the way down to close to zero. You might want to have it hover somewhere more around like, minus 50 or somewhere around there, to create your infrared effect. This is going to take those color tones to the correct levels, so that you can shoot infrared photography with the DSLR that you already have, and create amazing, creative photographs.