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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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