Infrared processing in DXO PL

I have converted a camera to infrared, but have beeing using DXO programs for many years. I have made up my own presets to process the IR shots, because I don’t want to use Photoshop, for various reasons. Any tips or suggestions for processing IR using the HSL colour wheel in PL3?

Play with it and save settings as a preset if you like them?

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Here’s some information by DxO:
https://nikcollection.dxo.com/project/in-the-heat-of-the-light-how-to-post-process-digital-infrared-photography-with-nik-collection-2-by-dxo-starring-vincent-versace/
https://nikcollection.dxo.com/project/digital-infrared-photography-workflows-with-dxo-photolab-2-and-nik-collection-2-by-dxo/

Other than that, the effect of the HSL wheel depends on wether you have shots from a camera that sees just IR, IR and some red or iR to UV and everything in between or… and what filters you used etc. If you target for b/w images, the channel mixer might do a thing or two too…

You could make available some of your files in order to let everyone have a try…

Thank you for your suggestions. My D800 and D300 have both been converted with what I would call standard IR conversion, according to the LifePixel website. I will upload a few files, converted to JPG in VNXi.

JPEGs are a fairly small and fenced playground. Nevertheless, you can do the following in the HSL colour wheel - just to give you an idea.

  • activate whatever colour you like
  • drag the outermost colour segment someplace else
  • drag the inner colour segment around until you sort of like what you get
  • drag around the inner segment’s handles until you sort of like what you get
  • repeat until you have what you want or reset the image

You can do the same with uncooked raw images, they offer a larger playground.

After a while of fooling around, you’ll get to know how to move in order to get where you want. Then, you’ll be able to create the images you imagine from your sources (uncooked raw files).

You can also go wild if you mess with tone curves, but you’d not necessarily need IR for it.


_8018029_Nik-8.JPG.dop (12.4 KB)

Here’s an other go at an infrared looking image. The source file a Kodacolor negative that I shot and then inverted in PhotoLab. I created the infrared look by running the image trough Viveza and Silver Efex (both from the current Nik Collection)

You can easily see that it’s a pseudo-IR image because the waterfall should be dark - unless its water came from a hot spring.

C-20200115-8129

Platypus just helped me figure out how to do a red/blue channel swap in PL. Thanks!

You need to go to the HSL module, select the red dot, expand your selection to a third of the wheel by dragging the inner selection handles outwards, and then use the outer handle to shift the color. Shifting it to the opposite of the wheel works best. Then do the same for blue.

dxo hsl shift

Oh and of course if you did not apply a custom whitebalance setting in-camera, you need to select a white balance point with the picker tool in the white balance module. Foliage works great.