A problem I’ve always had with infrared RAW files is pegging the WB temperature slider in ACR. In other words, there isn’t enough adjustment room in that slider. The solution is to make your own Infrared Camera Profile.
I can’t take credit for the idea. I ran into it in this video: http://lightroom-blog.com/2009/05/creating-ir-camera-profile.html
The idea is very simple.
What you’ll need:
So let’s get started.
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Open Adobe DNG Profile Editor and open a DNG image file from your camera (File/Open DNG Image…).
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Next, select the Color Matrices tab in Adobe DNG Profile Editor and adjust the WB temperature and tint sliders. I would recommend settings of between -80 and -100 for the temperature and 0 to -50 for the tint.
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Now export your new Camera Profile (File/Export…).
That’s it.
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To use your new camera profile, open an infrared image with ACR or Lightroom and choose your newly created camera profile. I’ll use ACR in this example. Here I’ve selected the Camera Calibration tab and selected my new camera profile:
Now select the basic tab in ACR (the first tab) and notice the extra latitude you now have in setting your WB temperature and tint.
Without a custom IR Camera Profile you have no latitude. In fact the temperature slider is pegged on the left side as shown below – this is with the standard canned camera profile called Adobe Standard.
The White Balance temperature/tint cannot be adjusted enough to get the grass and leaves to neutral without a custom IR Camera Profile.