Setting up a Basic Infrared Workflow – Part 1

Working with an Infrared camera can be rather timeconsuming if you have to do it all every single time. But there are some basic tools that allow IR edits to be done fairly quickly and repeatedly, and it’s my hopes that this series of 3 videos will assist other IR Photographers in their workflows. The original inspiration to do this series of videos came from a post at the Nikonites forum about not being able to get an IR converted Nikon D70 to White Balance properly in-camera. While this is a rather common problem among IR converted Nikons (not mine), it is entirely possible to work around this when you’re shooting RAW, and that’s that this first video is about.

Video #1 – Achieving A Proper White Balance & Easy Channel Swapping

One criticism of IR Converted Nikon cameras is that they often fail to achieve a proper white balance in-camera. While this is not the case with my D7000, the in-camera WB adjustment only applies to JPEGs and image previews. When shooting RAW you still get what you get, so while your JPEG preview might be fine, when you import your RAW file it is often impossible to achieve the same look using Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW because you run out of room on your White Balance slider. This can be remedied by creating a Custom Camera Profile using the Adobe DNG Profile Editor, which is a free download (Click here for Mac, and here for PC). In order to use it, you must have your RAW file converted to DNG format from NEF. This can be done on import into Lightroom, or using the DNG converter tool available with Adobe Camera RAW.

Once created, your custom profile can be applied to your IR images on import, or simply with a click in Lightroom or ACR, and it will provide you with the added room required on the Temperature slider to achieve a proper white balance.

The video also includes instructions on how to apply Level adjustments in Photoshop, and create a Channel Swap preset to save you time getting to the meat of your adjustments in Photoshop.