Infrared Film Effect
Hand it a photograph and it takes the picture again on infrared film — where anything alive and green glows white and a clear sky goes almost black, because chlorophyll is a mirror at a wavelength the eye cannot see. Two fields.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: a sunlit churchyard and a woman standing in a park. One shows what happens to stone and sky; the other shows what happens to skin, and to a coat that is dark without being green.
Measured on the same crop, the blue sky drops from 156 to 17, the yew foliage climbs from 22 to 141, and the stone roof barely changes. In the park, the dark wool coat goes from 32 to 34 because it is not alive. That split between what is green and what is merely dark is what makes the picture convincing, which is why the first field asks you to sort them. Both come out as true monochrome with no false colour, and the clouds stay bright against a near-black sky.
Generated for this library
Input
Alive the grass, the yew trees and the ivy
Not alive the stone, the path and the railings
Sky clear blue with three small high clouds
toward the left
Photograph churchyard.png (1254 x 1254)
Returned 1 image · 1:1 · the churchyard in infrared
foliage yew needles 22 up to 141, a factor of six
sky 156 down to 17, and the small cloud stays
bright against it
not-alive the stone roof 124 to 114, essentially
unchanged; a dark wool coat 32 to 34
place same church, same trees, same gravestones,
registered exactly
words none, in any scriptYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1What in the picture is alive and green, and what is not
- 2The sky, and what is in it
Infrared Film Effect
What this makes
Hand it a photograph and it takes the picture again on infrared film — where anything alive and green glows white and a clear sky goes almost black, because chlorophyll is a mirror at a wavelength the eye cannot see. Two fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach the photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. Sort the greens into living and not-living; that sorting is the whole instruction.
- Check a painted green thing. If it came back as bright as the grass, the run tinted by colour instead of by what reflects infrared.
- Then check the sky. It should be dark enough that the clouds look lit from within.
What you swap
- What in the picture is alive and green, and what is not
- the grass, the yew trees and the ivy are alive; the stone, the path and the railings are not
- The sky, and what is in it
- clear blue with three small high clouds toward the left
Before it runs
- A photograph, attached to the message. This re-photographs a particular place, so there has to be a picture of it.
- Living plants in the frame. The whole effect is chlorophyll, and a picture with no growing thing in it comes back as an ordinary monochrome photograph.
- Knowing what is alive and what only looks green. Painted green railings, a green car and artificial grass all stay dark, and that contrast is the most convincing thing in the result.
- Sky, if you can. The swap — bright cloud on a near-black sky — is half of why this looks the way it does.
When to reach for it
When a landscape should look like somewhere else entirely: a cover, a title card, a print, a record sleeve. Templates in this genre ask for an infrared or surreal look and hand back a photograph with the colours pushed around, which changes the mood and leaves every tone in the same order it started in.
What changes
- One photograph in, one infrared exposure out — the same place, recorded at a wavelength you cannot see.
- Living foliage goes brilliant white, because chlorophyll reflects almost all near infrared.
- A clear sky goes near black and clouds stay bright, so the two swap places.
- Skin turns waxy and pale and veins show through, which is the tell on any portrait.
- One image, no false-colour filter, no grain overlay, no border.
Pairs with
- Flatbed Scan EffectHand it a photograph of a thing and it comes back as a flatbed scan — no perspective at all, and everything lifted off the glass falling to black within a couple of centimetres. Two fields.
- Pinhole Camera EffectHand it a photograph and it takes the picture again through a pinhole — no lens, so nothing is ever truly sharp and nothing is ever more blurred than anything else, with the corners falling away because of simple geometry. Two fields.
- Wet Plate Collodion EffectHand it a photograph and it takes the picture again on a wet collodion plate — an emulsion blind to red and wide awake to blue, so lips go black, a sky goes blank white, and the whole look follows from that one fact. Two fields.