Infrared - filters and color swaps

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What you're looking at below is four different color renditions of the same scene. Three out of the four were shot using an infrared camera and a 720nm filter. Development programs like Lightroom default to assuming the image data is in normal human color, rendering everything in red and not showing much of the color differences. It's just data. By giving the software different instructions about how to interpret the colors, we can get the color and tone separation we want. 


Infrared - 720nm filter with colors straight from the camera

But as IR photo expert Rob Shea says, color isn't real. The choice of what rendered color the program maps onto the image data is arbitrary. I can pick what looks good for the scene, the vibe I want to convey, the textures and shapes I want to explore. 

Here's a normal-color shot of the same scene

One that I've been liking recently is to take the wavelengths reflected by chlorophyl, coming off of plants that would be green in normal vision, and rendering them as white. There are several ways to do that, but one that's been giving nice results recently is to invert the colors and desaturate the resulting yellows. That gives a blue sky, dark water, and snowy plant life. 


The final result






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