FALSE COLOR

imagining invisible colors

This gallery gathers a collection of pictures taken in different places and time that share the False Color postproduction technique.

False Color basically remaps IR light frequencies to visible light, contributing to give an oniric and surreal atmosphere.

I have personally never been a great fan of this technique, though recently I have been experimenting quite a lot and refined both my shooting and postproduction skills to come up with some interesting results.

In these pictures, you can see two basic postproduction techniques being applied:

1. Monochrome, where a grayscale landscape is matched to a false color graded sky; the basis is R/B channel inversion

2. False Color, which has both sky and landscape shifted to unreal color; in my case, I went for yellow and blue, but you can have some striking effects with pink-reddish landscapes.

For False Color, I work with JPG files as it allows me to get around some issues regarding color temperature.

When working with IR photography, the notion of color
loses pretty much any sense, as our eyes are not capable of seeing infrared light.

Luminosity though - dark and bright parts of the scene - still makes sense, and that's where thing go weird: foliage shines bright and blue skies appear deep black: everything around shines somehow different just because of how it absorbs and reflects infrared light compared to visible.

If you want to get deeper into IR photography,

click down here and go to the nerdiest page of my website.