A few false colour IR photos from a recent walk

A few days ago we finally had some decent weather for infrared photography (i.e. the sky wasn't overcast) and I also had some time to go out with my camera. I went on a walk around part of the local area, and took quite a few photos with my Fuji IS Pro full spectrum camera and a Hoya 25A Red filter.

This filter lets through both red and infrared light. So you can see through the viewfinder to compose your images easily, unlike with an opaque IR filter. The other benefit is that the additional red light the filter lets through makes it easier to create false colour infrared photos.

For the majority of the photos I processed them by setting the white balance on grass / foliage. Then in Photoshop I switched the blue and red channels (though not quite a 100% clean swap) using the channel mixer. After that I used a hue / saturation adjustment to shift the hues to the left, making foliage more orange and the sky more cyan.

There are no rules for how a false colour infrared image should look, you can use whatever colours you want since we have no way of perceiving infrared colour. However, I do like the standard yellow-orange foliage and blue sky colour scheme that many false colour infrared photographers use. I think those colours just complement each other well. Maybe it also has something to do with them not being extremely different to the colours we are used to perceiving.