Infrared Effect for Color Photographs
The infrared effect is often used when working with landscape photographs or other light and bright photos that contain much green color. The principle of this method is to lighten leaves and add a shining effect to the photo. For this tutorial, we chose the photo of a girl sitting in the beautiful green park. On its example, we will show you how to convert a color photo into an infrared image. So, do the following:
1. Open the chosen photo and duplicate it by dragging it over the Create New Level tab, and renaming it “Infrared”. It will come in use a little bit later.
2. Call up the Channel Mixer. Turn on the Monochrome checkbox to make our photo black-and-white one. Then in order to highlight the green color increase the Green channel to +200%. Taking into account that the value of all channels should not increase 100%, reduce values of other channels: set the Red and Blue channels at -80% and -20% correspondingly.
3. Now add the lightening effect to leaves. For that purpose, activate the duplicated layer (made in the very beginning). Go to the Channels palette and click on the Green channel to select it. Then apply the Gaussian Blur filter with Radius value of about 15 pixels to it. After that, reduce the filter effect. For that purpose, go to Edit – Fade Filter and lower the opacity to 25%. Then change the blend mode to Screen. Create new adjustment layer Levels, where reduce Output levels – in that way you will get rid of too bright areas. I’ve got 239.
Here is my result:
4. Now let’s decorate our image. Let is be the photo looking at it one says “Wow, that’s amazing! It looks so unusual and stylish”. Add to it some retro and glamour effects – we think, after that, the girl on the picture will look gorgeous and mysterious. After applying Channel Mixer, the girl on the photo got darkened lips. To improve this, just copy the lips area from the very lowest layer that was not affected by Green channel blurring.
After that, the girl will look mush better and fresher:
5. Then create the vignette effect. This will make the photo look older and its subject (the girl on trees background) stand out. There are many ways to darken photo borders but we choose the easiest and fastest. Look at the illustration.
6. Next step is adding a photo frame. This can be done by means of the following actions. Select the image by clicking Ctrl+A. Resize the chosen area: Select> Modify>Contract. I’ve got near 60 pixels. Then add so-called “hand-printed” effect to the photo like it was printed a little bit irregularly. For that purpose, right click, select in the menu Transform Selection and turn the chosen area a little bit. Invert the highlighting, create new layer and make it white. After selecting blending options, choose Outer Glow with white color and such settings:
As a result, we got blur effect of photo borders:
7. Then, make some shading. Create new adjustment layer Gradient Map with such parameters:
Do not to use very dark colors as we have sunny bright day photo. Try to find something light and bright.
8. Finally, the last step is decorating our photo with flowers, curves and butterflies. In such a way, the photo will look fresher and more attractive. However, the main thing is not to overdo!))
Written by Alex Fisher, photo album designer from HundredPics studio
