Colour infrared made easy
Love the infrared look but don’t fancy converting your camera? James Paterson turns to Affinity Photo filters
Infrared light is all around us, yet we can’t see it. That’s because the visible spectrum that we are able to view is really only a very narrow band of the entire range of electromagnetic radiation we know as light. If you think of the colours of the rainbow – violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red – each colour has a slightly different wavelength, and therefore a different speed. Red visible light has the longest wavelength and is the fastest. But just beyond visible red light is infrared, which is faster still. While not visible to the eye, there are cameras and sensors that can detect and capture infrared light. If you have an old camera then you can get it converted to capture infrared – an irreversible process – for a few hundred pounds.
But if you’d rather not make permanent changes to your camera, it is possible to add an infrared look to any photo with a combination of tonal adjustments and filters. We can achieve the process in Affinity Photo with ease. Colour infrared photography creates a certain look in which green and yellow foliage becomes reddish and appears to glow, while blue skies become very dark.
As such, we can mimic the infrared look by changing the brightness of different colour ranges, then apply a glow filter to enhance the effect. We’ll walk you through the simple process here and, along the way, encounter key Affinity Photo tools including Channel Mixer controls, Live Filters and adjustment layers.
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1 Colour brightness
Open the image in Affinity Photo (trees and foliage work well). Go to the Layers panel, click the Adjustment icon at the bottom and choose Black and White. Change the blend mode of the layer to Luminosity. Use the sliders to darken the blues and lighten the greens and yellows.
2 Invert the colours
Click the Adjustment Layer icon again and choose Invert to invert the image to a negative. Next go to the Layer Blend Mode dropdown and change it from Normal to Color. This gives you the beginnings of the colour change you see when you use an infrared camera.
3 Swap red and blue
