How do you create a color infrared look? Here’s the Infrared Film Filter in Nik Color Efex

Infrared photography is fascinating because it uses light below the visible spectrum to produce ethereal black and white images and surreal false color with color films. Strictly speaking, it requires film sensitized specifically for infrared wavelengths or camera sensors with the infrared filters removed. But it is possible to achieve the same look digitally using regular color images.

Even with proper infrared film and cameras there is some artistic license at play because you need to translate these unseen wavelengths into visible light you can actually see. With color infrared in particular, the colors created are a matter of interpretation, but there are sets of colors we expect to see in infrared images and these can be recreated digitally in a reasonably convincing fashion.

In fact Nik Color Efex, part of the DxO Nik Collection, has a dedicated Infrared Film Filter, and here it is in action.

The infrared version on the right has the classic color shifts of infrared film, with skies taking on a deep cyan tone and vegetation turning purple. It’s a straight and surreal effect, so it’s going to work best on images that already have this feeling about them. Here, the ruined castle walls in the background make a striking and strange silhouette.

How Nik Color Efex Filters work

1. Nik Color Efex offers both Presets and Filters in its left sidebar. Presets are pre-packaged combinations of different filter effects combined, while Filters are the basic building blocks. You can use Filters individually, and this is often the best way to build a custom effect.
2. Alongside each Filter in the list, you’ll see a small disclosure arrow. If you click on this you’ll see a selection of pre-configured settings for that filter and how they will look on your image. This is a really quick way to get started. You just click on the thumbnail you like and the filter is added to the filter stack over in the right sidebar.
3. When you move the mouse over the Filter you want in the left sidebar you will see a ‘+’ button. When you click on this, the Filter is added to the filter stack in the right sidebar, in addition to any others you’ve already added. If you don’t click the ‘+’ button, the Filter will replace whatever Filter is currently active in the right sidebar. Just remember – click to replace, click ‘+’ to add.

The Nik Color Efex Infrared Film settings

This filter offers both black and white and color infrared effects, and once you’ve chosen these with the Method pop-up, there’s really not much else to do.

• Method: use this drop-down menu to choose the infrared effect you want to create. It’s a lot like choosing an old-school infrared film and filtering options. For this image I’ve chosen ‘Method 2’, which gives a color image with the classic color infrared color palette.
• Lighten Highlights: the infrared ‘look’ typically has bright, ethereal highlights, and this slider is especially useful for black and white images.
• Brightness: use this to make the image darker or lighter
• Contrast: use this to give the image more contrast or less
• Shadows: if the darker areas of your image are turning to a solid black you can use this slider to bring back some detail – though the solid shadows work very well in this example
• Highlights: this slider can recover a certain amount of highlight detail if it’s being blown out, though with strong infrared effects like this, it’s probably less important than in regular photography
• Opacity: you can tone down the overall strength of the infrared effect with this slider, though if you’ve got the other settings how you want them you probably won’t need to.

The Infrared Film Filter in Nik Color Efex only creates the appearance of infrared film, because regular digital images don’t have any actual infrared image data to work from. However, in the infrared spectrum, blue skies are typically rendered very dark (they don’t have much infrared in them) while vegetation is very much lighter because it has a much larger infrared component – and software filters like this can shift these colors to simulate that.

If you like this effect and you have the Nik Collection already, why not try it out? Alternatively, if you don’t have the Nik Collection, you can download a free trial which will give you plenty of time to check it out and see what else it can do – see the links below.

• DxO Nik Collection 8 review
• More Nik Collection news and tutorials
• Nik Collection free trial and DxO store