Tips to Convert Your Images to Infrared

How to Create a Digital Infrared Effect in Photoshop

Infrared photographs are unmistakable. Foliage glows almost white, the sky goes deep and heavy, and clouds separate out of it with a brightness they never have in an ordinary exposure. The look comes from a camera recording light your eye cannot see, which normally means buying a dedicated infrared body or having an existing one converted.

You can get most of the way there in Photoshop instead, using a photograph you already have. It will not be a true infrared capture and it is not trying to be. What it will do is reproduce the tonal relationships that make infrared images striking: bright greens, dark sky, and strong separation between the two.

What Actually Makes an Image Read as Infrared

Before touching a slider it helps to know what you are aiming at. In a real infrared photograph, foliage reflects strongly and renders bright, close to white. The sky renders dark. Clouds stay bright against it, so the contrast between sky and cloud is far greater than normal. Everything is monochrome. That is the whole target, and every step below serves one of those three relationships.

This Works on Landscapes, Not on People

Worth saying early, because it saves a wasted afternoon: the technique looks good on trees, fields and skies, and looks distinctly strange on portraits. Skin does not behave the way foliage does. Pick a landscape.

Start With a Black and White Adjustment Layer

The conversion is where most of the effect is won or lost, because it decides how bright each color becomes once the color is gone.

1. Add a Black and White Adjustment Layer

   Work through the presets first, including the blue filter and the high contrast red filter, to see how differently each treats the same scene. There is even one named Infrared, though it rarely gives the most convincing result on a given image.

2. Raise the Greens

   This is what lifts foliage toward white.

3. Lower the Cyans and the Blues

   Both live in the sky. Dropping them is what produces the heavy, dark sky the effect depends on.

4. Raise the Yellows

   There is usually more yellow in leaves than expected, and it adds to the brightness.

5. Lower the Reds

   Reds tend to sit in bark and branches, which should stay dark against the bright leaves.

This gets you a credible base. It will not be finished, and it is not meant to be. The remaining work is done by treating the sky and the foliage separately.

Select the Sky With Color Range

The sky needs its own treatment, which starts with isolating it while the image still has color in it.

Hide the Conversion Before You Select

This trips people up. You cannot sample a color range while the Black and White adjustment layer is visible, because there is no color left to sample. Switch the adjustment layer off and click the background layer first. The blue may look weak on screen; it is still perfectly selectable.

6. Open Select > Color Range

   With the background layer active and the Black and White layer hidden, open the Color Range dialog.

7. Sample the Sky With the Eyedropper

   Click directly on the sky to set the color the selection is built from.

8. Raise Fuzziness Until the Whole Sky Is Included

   Color Range favors lighter tones, so light areas of the sampled color are selected and dark ones largely are not. Fuzziness widens the range until the selection covers what you need.

Darken the Sky With a Gradient

A flat darkening reads as fake. Real skies are not evenly toned.

9. Create a New Layer With the Selection Active

   Keep the sky selection loaded and add a new empty layer to paint the gradient onto.

10. Press G for the Gradient Tool and Choose the Linear Gradient

    Set the foreground color to black and pick the linear gradient style.

11. Drag Black From the Top of the Frame Downward, Holding Shift

    Shift constrains the gradient to vertical so it does not drift sideways. Drag a second time for a darker sky. If it goes too dark, redo the gradient a little higher until the falloff looks natural.

Why Skies Get Lighter Toward the Horizon

Looking straight up you see through relatively little atmosphere. Looking toward the horizon you are looking through far more of it, stacked, with more water particles in the way, so the sky lightens as it approaches the horizon. Building that gradient in is what makes a darkened sky read as real, and the same principle is worth carrying into any composite you build.

Brighten the Foliage, Selectively

The foliage gets the opposite treatment, and the restraint you show here decides whether it reads as leaves or as a white shape.

12. Return to the Background Layer and Open Select > Color Range Again

    Switch the Black and White layer off again so there is color to sample.

13. Sample the Greens

    Click on a representative area of foliage with the eyedropper.

14. Be Deliberately Restrained With the Selection

    Selecting every green in the frame produces a flat blanket of white with no detail left in it. Aim to catch the leaves while leaving the trunks and branches out.

15. Make a New Layer and Fill the Selection With White

    Use Cmd + Delete on Mac or Ctrl + Delete on PC, with white as the background color.

16. Lower the Layer Opacity

    Full white is almost always too much. Back it off until the foliage is bright but still has structure.

17. Mask Out Anything That Should Have Stayed Dark

    Branches and trunks will usually catch some of the fill. Paint them back out on a layer mask, since in a real infrared photograph the limbs stay dark while the leaves go bright, and honoring that is most of what sells the result.

Fix the Dark Halo Around the Edges

At this point a thin dark fringe often appears where the bright foliage meets the dark sky. It comes from a slight color shift right at those boundaries, and it is the most obvious tell that the image was built rather than captured.

18. Select the Background With Color Range Again

    Load a fresh selection of the sky area.

19. Fill That Selection With a Light Color on a New Layer

    Any light color works; white is fine.

20. Go to Select > Modify > Contract and Enter About 2 Pixels

    This shrinks the active selection inward by a couple of pixels.

21. Press Delete

    You filled the whole selection, then shrank it and deleted the middle, so what remains is a thin band of light tracing every edge.

22. Lower the Opacity Until It Blends

    That band of light cancels the band of dark, and the boundary stops announcing itself.

Darken the Foreground to Add Depth

One last adjustment separates foreground from background and pushes attention where you want it.

23. Add a Curves Adjustment Layer and Pull the Curve Down

    Darken the whole image for now; the mask will control where it lands.

24. Invert Its Layer Mask

    Press Cmd/Ctrl + I. The darkening is now hidden everywhere.

25. Paint White on the Mask Over the Foreground

    Grass and ground at the base of the frame. Darkening them pulls attention up toward the tree and the sky, and separates foreground from background. A little over the tree trunk keeps it dark too.

What Trips People Up

Trying to sample a color range with the Black and White layer switched on is the most common stall, since there is no color there to select. After that it is over-selecting the greens, which flattens the foliage into a shape rather than leaves. Ignoring the edge halo is the one that quietly ruins otherwise good results, because the eye reads that fringe as an edit even when it cannot name it. And a sky darkened evenly, with no gradient, never quite looks like sky.

What Makes the Illusion Hold

The effect is convincing because it reproduces relationships rather than colors. Infrared is recognizable by bright foliage against a dark sky with clouds separating strongly out of it, and every one of those is a tonal relationship, which is precisely what a Black and White conversion lets you control directly. Working without color removes a whole dimension from the problem. That is not the same as saying black and white is easy; it means the variables you are left with are the ones that matter here.

Try It on Your Own Landscapes

Nothing in this process is expensive or irreversible. It is an adjustment layer, two color-range selections and a few masks, all of which stay editable. The real skill is in restraint: how much white to leave in the leaves, how far to take the sky, and how much of the halo fix to let through. Those are judgment calls that improve with a second and third attempt on the same frame, which is exactly why every step here lives on its own layer.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• ConvertBlack and White adjustment layer: Greens and Yellows up; Cyans, Blues and Reds down
• Select a colorHide the Black and White layer, click the background, Select > Color Range, raise Fuzziness
• Darken the skyG for the Gradient Tool, Linear, black from the top holding Shift
• Brighten leavesNew layer, Cmd/Ctrl + Delete fills with white (background color), lower opacity, mask the branches
• Fix the haloFill the sky selection light, Select > Modify > Contract 2 pixels, Delete, lower opacity
• Add depthCurves pulled down, Cmd/Ctrl + I to invert the mask, paint white over the foreground
• Before and afterAlt/Option-click the background layer’s eye icon to hide every other layer

No AI, no generative credits.