Lightroom Infrared Color Swap Profiles Update

Introducing the new version of my Lightroom Infrared Color Swap Profiles. The new version adds 22 new color swap profiles for each temperature. Do you enjoy using Adobe Lightroom to edit images but are frustrated by the challenges and extra steps required to edit infrared photos entirely within Lightroom? Would you prefer to avoid the round trip to Photoshop and the extra TIF or PSD files? With these profiles, you can color-swap your infrared images directly in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and even Lightroom Mobile without a roundtrip to Photoshop!

Lightroom Infrared Color Swap Profiles

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Transcript for 100% Lightroom workflow for Infrared Photography. Duration: 19:04.

• 0:00 Would you like to streamline the editing of your infrared images? Do you find jumping between programs to set a white balance and swap colors tedious? I did, so I created the Lightroom Infrared Color Swap Profiles. These profiles make it easy to do 100% of your infrared editing in any flavor of Lightroom.
• 0:22 Today, I'm adding four times as many profiles for each color temperature, giving you way more creative color choices with even less editing. Let's explore the new color choices and walk through the process of using these profiles. At the end of this video, I'll talk about alternatives for raw editors other than Lightroom.
• 0:45 Before we do a full edit of an image, let's walk through all of the profiles that are available in the Color Swap Profiles. So here I am in Lightroom, if I try to do a white balance on the clouds, you notice that I can get most of the way there, but not quite there. And that's why I need my color shifting profiles.
• 1:05 I've set those to be my favorites, so they show up right here, Infrared Temp -50 and -100. I'm going to select -100 because this is a 590 nanometer image, and I know that 100 will work best with this filter. So if I select the clouds now with my white balance picker, now you can see I have a good white balance. I
• 1:28 a gold color in the sky, the clouds are a nice pure white, the fence is a nice neutral gray, and the trees and the grass are a nice baby blue. This is the perfect state for me to work with. If you have a higher numbered cutoff filter such as a 665 or 720, you'll get less color saturation. But if you have a lower numbered filter
• 1:51 such as a 550, you'll simply have more color saturation. So now that we have a good white balance, let's look at the profiles. If I open up the profile browser, I can now see that I have the original profiles and a couple new groups. So let's first walk through the original profiles. So there's 18 profiles in here, six for a
• 2:15 -50. We'll kind of skip those because we've already balanced to -100. Six for -100, we've got a hue adjustment, invert, RB, which is a color swap with a channel mixer, a shift of the green channel to blue, a shift of the green channel to red, and a split between channels. So those are our six treatments in the original version,
• 2:37 and then we also have six more for any image that is not assigned to a camera, any kind of JPEG image. So those are the original color swap profiles. Now we have two new groups, and I've put these in separate groups because there's a lot more profiles. There's now 22 for each color treatment, and putting them in
• 2:54 groups I found is an easier way to manage them. So there's 22 profiles if I'm using a -50 color temperature and 22 if I'm using a -100. So let's open up the -100 because I know I've got that set and we can look at all of the profiles. So the first one here is amber, then we have candy
• 3:16 and flamingo. You may say, "Well, candy and flamingo, they look a lot alike. Why are there two separate profiles?" And the reason is because they use a different methodology for creating the profile. One of them uses a channel mixer and the other one uses a hue adjustment. And having
• 3:34 both gives you flexibility. Sometimes with different filters and different cameras, these two will look different. And sometimes you'll want to manipulate the colors in your image and you may not be able to manipulate them well with one. You could switch to the other and do the manipulation you like. So you'll
• 3:50 see a few cases where profiles look the same, but they're not actually the same. That's the reason why I wanted you to have that flexibility to be able to switch to a similar profile if you need to do some other color adjustments.
• 4:04 So we have gold, we have invert, we have mint, which is look, neon, also another new look, pink, purple, rose. You'll know each one of these will do a different color to the sky and a different color to the foliage.
• 4:27 We have sage, and now we get it down into the sky series. The sky series, what I wanted to do was give you the opportunity to select the perfect hue of sky for whatever your filter camera combination is. And that's going to vary with each. There is now way to create a [profile] that's going to
• 4:47 create the perfect sky color for every situation. And so having a series of them allows you to pick which works best. So for example, we have sky 15. As I work through these, you'll see the sky color shift just slightly. Sky 16, Sky 17, Sky 18, probably 17 for this image was best, Sky 19 starting to get a little
• 5:08 bit more purple, and Sky 20. I've tested this in a variety of situations that I've seen some cases where something towards the sky 15 or 16 actually produced the best blue sky. And I've seen other cases where something closer to 19 and 20 produce the best blue sky. So I wanted to offer that entire range
• 5:27 so that you can find the color that works best for you. Alright let's continue down. We have Split, Swap, Teal, another new treatment, Violet, and finally a completely new treatment, White. So this is a profile that will keep your sky blue and turn your foliage white as a way to mimic the type of look you might see
• 5:52 with a 720 nanometer filter. If you want your foliage to be white, then this is the filter that will get you there. Now that we've seen the profiles, let's walk through the full edit of an infrared image. This is a 590 nanometer image. So we'll start in Adobe Color, we know that's not
• 6:11 going to get us a good white balance. Let's try white balancing on the ground here, not good enough. So let's switch to Infrared Temp -100. It's set to be one of my favorites, so it'll appear in this list. And I can then grab the white balance picker. And now I have choices. I could grab a little bit of cloud over
• 6:28 here. I'm going to use the W key to select it again. I could grab the ground. W key, I could hit the granite. Any one of these will get me a pretty good white balance. I want to pick something neutral within the subject. Now that I've got a good white balance, now when I open up the profile browser and look at these profiles, the
• 6:47 benefit of setting a white balance first is that I can now see a preview of what all the colors will look like once I'm here within the profile browser. And I can sample each one. I can look at all of these and say just roll my mouse over them. I don't even need to pick them. Which one is going to look best for this image? Which
• 7:08 colors will convey the mood, the atmosphere, the tone that I'm trying to achieve? And I can look across all of these, all of the sky variations, all of the colors, all of the colors. And I can then all of the different options from these 22 and pick whichever one is going to create the mood that I'm looking for. This one might
• 7:27 be maybe an alien world that you're looking for. So there's definitely profiles in here that can help you to achieve that. I'm going to pick for this edit amber. We'll start with amber. Okay, so I've picked my profile. Let's close the profile browser. One of the benefits of doing a color swap right in Lightroom is now I can play with the
• 7:46 white balance and I can see what the result is just by sliding the temperature slider. is live. So if I drag it to the left towards the blue, my colors are swapped. So it's going to add more yellow to the image. So if I want to warm up the image, I could do this. This would give me a certain kind of look. And if I wanted to cool
• 8:05 off the image, I could drag the slider to the right. And that would emphasize the blues and diminish the yellows. One of the benefits, the key benefits of being able to preview your image with the color swap and to adjust your white balance is that you get full control over the colors in your image. In this case, I'll just
• 8:24 grab the picker and select the granite. But know that you have that full capability to preview exactly what you're going to see in your final image. I absolutely love that. Let's move on with some of our basic edits. So I'll do a quick auto. We'll see what Lightroom says there. Makes a little bit of an adjustment.
• 8:40 I'm going to drag the highlights down because I get a lot more detail in my highlights when I drag them down, especially in clouds. Let's go down to the tone curve. And you could pick one of these presets. So you could pick medium contrast or you could pick strong contrast or you could
• 8:55 manually make adjustments to the curve. In this case, I'll just pick medium contrast as a good starting point. Now I'd like to make some masks. So let's come up to the mask tool. we'll start with sky traditional sky mask. It's the first place I usually start when creating masks is the sky.
• 9:12 if you like, you can accept the sky as is or you can make tweaks to it. I see the sky is bleeding into the landscape a little bit. So let me make a little bit of an adjustment here. I'll click on my mask. My sky and I will select subtract and then I will use I'm going to try an object.
• 9:33 I think that if I select this mountain range.
• 9:37 It will get deselected from the sky mask.
• 9:43 And I can very quickly have a nice clean sky mask. So let's see what happens with the subtract an object. So that did a pretty good job. You could see I have no more green hue along the edge here. So very nice. So now I have a nice clean sky. The thing that will typically do with
• 10:02 the sky is kick up the Dehaze because I like me some Dehaze. This will be more dramatic if there are clouds in the sky. Not much clouds in this image. Just a few on the horizon, but I'll still bring it up a little bit to deepen the blue of the sky. But I typically will use a lot more if there are clouds in the sky.
• 10:23 so I've improved my sky a little bit. if I want to make changes to the ground. I will right click on my sky and select duplicate and invert mask. So very commonly I will do this. This gives me a quick grab of the ground where I could increase the texture a little bit and increase the
• 10:40 clarity. So make some adjustments to the ground. I find that this foreground is a little too dominating. So what I'd like to do is cut back the brightness of the foreground so that the attention is drawn more towards the center of the image. And I'm going to do that by creating a new mask, a linear gradient.
• 11:00 We'll start a linear gradient. I'm going to click near the bottom of this tree here in the middle. I'm going to hold down the shift key and then drag up so I get a nice straight line across the image. And what I'd like to do is bring down the exposure just a little bit so that the
• 11:16 maybe a third of a stop there so that the foreground is not so commanding. The other thing that I can do because this is mostly a neutral. element. I could actually adjust the temperature as well. Now it'll be opposite of what you expect. So if I go to the blue, it'll add bit of a yellow color to this. Here's all the way. And if I go to the yellow side,
• 11:40 it'll make this very blue. This gives me some choices in creating some separation in my image. If I wanted the ground to more distinctly stand out from the foliage, I could drag this way to adjust its color temperature. If I wanted the ground to blend more not be so distracting, then I could shift to adding yellow to it by going to the
• 12:01 blue side. And I think I'll do that a little bit so the ground blends a little bit more and doesn't stand out as much. Alright, I really like that result. So be sure to pay attention to the temperature slider in your masks. There may be areas where you can make further refinements to the color temperature.
• 12:18 I'd like these mountains to pop a little bit more. So let's go and create a new mask. I'm going to do an object. We will also will sort of recreate what we did earlier. And I will select the mountains because I want to increase the contrast. In the mountains, of course, they're off in the distance. So they're a little hazy. We can
• 12:41 attack that with a little bit of dehaze. So let's see what Lightroom does in selecting the mountains. Again, I think it did a pretty good job of selecting the mountains and not selecting the clouds in the distance and not selecting the foreground either. So very nice object mask. Let's
• 12:57 go to dehaze and I'm going to increase the dehaze because I like some contrast in the mountains. Maybe a little bit of clarity. You could even go into the curve and increase the curve as well. So either at a medium curve or go in and make adjustments to the curve. So lots of opportunities for adding contrast. I like the
• 13:16 way that the mountains are looking. The mountains in the way distance are still hazy, but that's good. That'll help create a little bit of separation there. But I like the way that the sort of mid range mountains look now much better. The last thing that I want to do is the brightness of this
• 13:31 bush in the front a little bit this little tree here. So what we can do is create new mask I could brush this or I could do a radial gradient around it. But let's try using the object mask again and see what we can get. So I'll make my I'm using my mouse wheel to roll and make this a little bigger. And now I'm going to just draw this red
• 13:54 circle around this little tree and we'll see how Lightroom does in selecting this as an object. So pretty good for most of it. Maybe let's zoom in a little bit so we can see see how well this did. so that is my selection. So let me refine the selection by opening up this and hitting add and I'm going
• 14:18 to add an object and we're going to go make my circle here a little smaller. And then over on the left side we'll draw. Okay, that's better. And I want to add another object To pick-up this part of the bush here and we'll add that in. Okay, that's pretty good. And then there's a little bit more over on the right side here. So I'll do another add object.
• 14:50 We'll see if that can pick up sort of this edge so I can get a nice clean mask. There we go. That is a whole bunch of objects but basically all created in the single mask. To help me then make adjustments to what this looks like. Okay, so now that I've got that adjusted, I can make some little tweaks. I could do
• 15:09 just a hint of a bump in exposure. Let me go back to the full screen now so I can see this in the context of the rest of the image. I can add a little bit of contrast. I'm going to bring up the shadows a little bit because it's very dark and I want it to pop a little bit. And then I could come down to effects and I
• 15:28 could select the texture and increase the texture. I could look at clarity. If I give it a lot of clarity, it'll get very harsh. I might do a little bit of negative clarity here to kind of soften up the highlights. I like the way that that looks. So now I've done a bunch of masks
• 15:45 and I've made a bunch of changes and I'm pretty happy with this image is at. Another one of the benefits of these Color Swap profiles is that even after I've done all my edits, I can still change my mind about which profile that I want to use and all of the changes that I've made up to this point will be retained. This
• 16:02 wouldn't be the case if I had to go to Photoshop and come back and and if I wanted to start over, I'd lose some of those changes made along the way. I can retain everything that I've built up to this point and simply change the profile. So let's go into the basic panel. We'll open up the profile browser and now I can see all of the profiles that are
• 16:20 available and you can see that even the previews have been updated to show me all the additional contrast that I've added to this image. So let's say that I wanted to turn this into Rose and I could select that the other changes that I've made are retained, all the masks are still there, all
• 16:37 the tweaks that I've made are still retained and I've just simply collected another profile. Let's say I wanted to get a little more alien and I came down to this teal. I've got the new color profile set. I still have the changes that I've made to the bush and the sky and the mountains in the background. They're all still available
• 16:54 and I can make these tweaks anytime. So I really love being able to edit an image, see a full preview of what the image is going to look like with changes I've made to white balance, with changes I've made to color and all of those things all along the way. Let's say I go back to the
• 17:15 Rose look, can even re-explore the white balance. I've picked another profile, let's close this and now I could look at the white balance and say, oh, do I want to go a little cooler? And do I like the look that that gives me with this profile or do I want to go warmer and like the look that
• 17:31 that gives me? So you have all of the ability to make these changes and preview them and see them in real time by changing your white balance, changing the profile that you select and getting just the right mood, just the right look, the feeling that you want for your infrared image.
• 17:49 Give me a few days to create your profiles. This process takes four times as long, and profiles still need to be created for each camera model. Your patience is is appreciated. I've been testing these new profiles for the last six months. Existing users who upgrade will only cover the price difference. Watch your email
• 18:08 for a discount link and contact me if you don't see it. This upgrade was inspired by my ON1 Photo Raw infrared presets. If you edit your images with ON1 Photo Raw, check out the ON1 Photo Raw infrared presets. If you're editing infrared video or using other raw editors for your infrared
• 18:29 images, check out the PRO infrared LUTs. The PRO infrared LUTs contain 270 LUTs with over 10 styles across 23 color swap treatments. There are also monochrome LUTs. I'll have a video on the Pro infrared LUTs coming soon. If Lightroom is your program, then Lightroom Infrared Color Swap Profiles are best for you.
• 18:53 Any questions? Let us know in the comments. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography journey, like, subscribe, or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks!