includes reducing the red’s intensity by
turning down Photoshop’s red saturation
slider. That said, color infrared, at least
the way I use it, almost always creates a
late-day or sunset feeling, even when those
warm colors aren’t present in a scene. This
is largely because it gives the sky—whether
blue or not—a red, orange or yellow cast.
The other colors captured in RAW files
from my color infrared camera include
blue-greens produced by foliage, and
I work with these to make the photo-
graph look less far-out. I’m not a big
fan of channel swapping, the technique
in which you reverse an infrared image’s
red and blue channels in Photoshop to
create an intensely blue sky and golden
foliage, for the same reason I wasn’t a fan
of color infrared film—though it might
work perfectly well for an album cover.
One last point before getting into the
specifics of each image: Photoshop’s RAW
converter seems to get confused by the
overwhelming red of color infrared cap-
ture. I get better results using Nikon’s own
Capture NX-D RAW-conversion software
to turn the camera’s proprietary NEF filesinto TIFFs, color-balancing them by click-
ing the eyedropper tool on the most neutral
point I can find in the image. This helps
reduce some of the overabundance of red.
If your camera maker offers processing
software, you might try it.
The effect I get this way isn’t something
you can or should use all the time, and most
of my photographs are still in black-and-
white. (I’ve shot them with a Nikon D800
converted to LifePixel’s Standard Infrared
filter, which gives me fairly monochrome
RAW files.) As the images here show,
though, with the right subject and some
careful post-production work, color infra-
red capture lets you create a dramatic yet
subtle image that can rival any great sunset.Cranes Feeding At Sunset,
Bosque Del Apache
National Wildlife Refuge
The light was pretty warm already when
I photographed these cranes eating the
corn that’s fed to them in winter at New
Mexico’s Bosque del Apache National
Wildlife Refuge. Infrared turned the
sky yellowish-orange, and that color isAbove: Small Pond At Dusk,
Stamford, Connecticut
Opposite: Cypress Tendons,
Florida Everglades
52 Outdoor Photographer outdoorphotographer.com