Adobe Photoshop Tutorial: Infrared Photo Effect

Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer

With my photo open in Photoshop, I currently have one layer in my Layers palette, the "Background" layer, which contains my original image:

The first thing I need to do in creating this effect is to duplicate this layer, and I'll do that with the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac), which tells Photoshop to give me a copy of this layer directly above it:

Photoshop automatically names the layer "Layer 1", which tells me nothing about it, so I'm going to double-click directly on the name of the layer and rename it to "infrared":

Step 2: Select The Green Channel In The Channels Palette

Go to your Channels palette (it's grouped in beside the Layers palette) and click on the Green channel to select it:

This will turn your image temporarily black and white:

If you don't understand yet how channels in Photoshop work, it may seem odd that when you selected the green color channel in the Channels palette, the image turned black and white instead of, well, green. We won't get into the details here of how channels work, since that would take an entire tutorial on its own, but what you're seeing here is in fact the green color information in the image, not as you and I see it but as Photoshop sees it, since Photoshop sees everything as either black, white, or some shade of gray in between. If that makes little sense to you, don't worry, you don't need to understand it to create this effect. Simply knowing to click on the green channel in the Channels palette to select it is enough.

We're going to blur this green channel next.