Photoshop-Infrared Effect

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Black and white layer command is a great new feature added in Photoshop CS3, which lets you convert a color image to grayscale while you have full control over the color being converted. You can also apply a color tint to the image.

Download the project and open infrared.jpg. Create a new Black and White adjustment layer. Photoshop performs a default grayscale conversion based on the image color values. Color sliders adjust the gray tones of the specific color in the image. Drag to the left to darken the grays and to the right to lighten the grays. Click on the Auto button to apply an automatic gray mix. The Auto button gives you a good mix of grays. Now adjust the sliders to adjust the gray tone.

When you move mouse over the image, it changes to an eyedropper. Click and hold on an image to highlight the color chip in the dialogue box of the color underneath that eyedropper. Drag to the left or to the right to change the slider values for that color. ALT click on the color chip to reset the color to its original value. Enable the Tint button to give your image a nice tint color. Hue and Saturation of the tint color can be controlled from the Hue/Saturation Sliders. Click on the tint color swatch to farther enhance the tint effect.

You can save and load the presets by clicking on the Load/Save preset icon.

Once you save your preset, it will appear in the Preset dropdown immediately. Now you can apply that effect to any image.

Set the slider values as shown below.

Red (-40), Yellow (235), Greens (144), Cyans (-31), Blue (-38) and Magentas (-100)

Now the infrared effect is applied to the image.

Written by: Pradeep Mamgainis a VFX Educator at Frameboxx Animation and Visual Effects, Gurgaon Haryana, India. He writes Visual Effects, Post and Dynamics tutorials using various CG Packages. He is founder of the websites CGSutra.com and Aniquito.com.
Last revised by: on March 4, 2010.