Invisible Waterfall

Infrared landscape photography is in a world all its own. The high contrast created between the glowing trees and dark skies and water easily transform an image. It can be difficult to pre-visualize exactly how the scene will change in the infrared spectrum, and watching the camera’s live view feed can be as enjoyable as actually taking the pictures.

The colour in this image is fake, because we cannot actually perceive the IR spectrum. Differences in the wavelengths of light exist, but our eyes can’t detect them and our brains can’t interpret them. What many infrared photographers, including myself, choose to do is to remap these wavelengths of light back to colours that are more familiar to us than invisible shades of red. By setting the proper whitebalance and then swapping the red and blue colour channels in Photoshop, it’s relatively easy to get a blue sky. The technique takes a bit of practice and experience, but much of the process can be set up using actions in Photoshop to speed things up.