Luminar Neo for Infrared Photography

Using Luminar Neo for Infrared Photography, setting a white balance, and various methods for swapping colors, including using LUTs.

Update 2024-09-21 - I’ve received multiple reports indicating that while Luminar Neo supports their camera model, the program does not recognize raw files shot in IR. I had a similar problem when making a video on Luminar 4 a few years ago. At the time, it was unclear if this was an issue where the camera raw files from my Fujifilm X-T20 were not supported or were specific to IR. It appeared resolved in later versions since those files from the Fujifilm X-T20 are now recognized as raw. However, multiple people are now having the same issue with cameras that are listed as supported.

Be sure to test the trial version of Luminar with your raw files before purchasing. When editing your raw file, look for the blue “Raw” tag next to the Develop module name. If you don’t see it, your camera model is unsupported or Luminar cannot recognize IR images shot in raw.

Here is a list of Luminar-supported cameras.

If you are interested in color swapping LUTs for Luminar NEO, check out:

PRO Infrared LUTs

LUTs for Color Infrared Video and Photography

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Transcript for Luminar Neo for Infrared Photography. Duration: 10:12.

• 0:00 Let's take a look at Luminar Neo for infrared photography. I'll walk you through the key features for editing infrared images. Luminar Neo is available via subscription or a one-time license. It's available for Mac, Windows, as a plugin for Lightroom and Photoshop, and as an extension for macOS photos.
• 0:21 This image was shot with a 665 nanometer high-pass infrared filter from Kolari Vision. All right, so let's take a look. We'll start here in the catalog up here at the top, and we're going to jump over to the edit section. So we'll click on edit, edit, and this will bring up some new
• 0:37 and this will bring up some new tools. We have layers on the left, and then our editing tools over on the right. The first thing that we want to do is set a white balance. let's go into edit section, and in edits, we've already started with develop and noiseless. One of the things that
• 0:53 you need to be aware of with Luminar Neo is the tools are available here, and once you start editing a tool, then that tool becomes available in the edit tab for the layer you're working on. So just be sure you keep all of that straight as you're making changes. So here under edits in the develop section, I'm going to go to camera profile, and
• 1:11 one of the things that's really nice about Luminar Neo is that it supports custom DCP profiles. These are the profiles that are available in the Infrared Profile Pack that allow us to set a good white balance on infrared images. So you can click here to add a custom DCP profile. I've already loaded up some
• 1:29 profiles for this camera, the Fujifilm X70, so let's select one of those, that'll give us a little bit of an edge in beginning to set a white balance. So now here in the develop section, I can go down to color, and in color, I'm going to select the eyedropper, and then I'm going to pick a good subject for white balance.
• 1:49 Clouds are a good subject in this case. It could be something neutral or colorless in your image. It could be pavement or buildings or something else that doesn't have any color. Clouds are always a good subject, so I want my clouds to be white without a color cast. The sky becomes golden color,
• 2:08 and the foliage becomes a baby blue. This is what I would expect with a 665 nanometer infrared filter. Now that we've set a white balance, let's talk about the four ways that you can color swap an image. So the first is channel mixer, the second is invert, the third is a hue shift, and then the fourth is LUTs. So we'll step through each of those.
• 2:32 those. The first one, channel mixer, The first one, channel mixer, unfortunately, is not supported by Luminar Neo. Luminar Neo. Earlier versions of Luminar Earlier versions of Luminar did have a channel mixer, but for some reason this latest version does not. That's unfortunate. That would have been a nice addition
• 2:45 for infrared photography. So no channel mixer. Let's move on to the second option, which is the invert layer. to do the invert layer, it's a little bit involved here in Luminar, so let's walk through this. We'll go over to layers on the left, and I'm going to right click on layers and select
• 3:01 duplicate layer. And so now we'll have a second layer, you'll see highlighted with this outline which layer you're editing. That's important to be aware of the layers you're editing. So now that I have a duplicate, I'm going to come over to my tools and I'll go down and find develop under the essential section.
• 3:19 we're going to pick curves. So we've got all these develop options, but curves is the thing we're looking for to do an invert. So I'm going to take the curve and I'm going to drag the top right to the bottom and the bottom left to the top. And when I've done, it will look much like a film color negative
• 3:37 Now I'm going to go up to layer properties and here I'm going to adjust the blend mode of the image. The blend mode is this drop down that says normal and I'm going to select hue. get a preview before I even select it and you can see that it has swapped the colors. I have a bluish sky and a auburn sort of
• 3:59 color in the foliage and this is what I'm expecting. In some programs hue and color blend modes produce the exact same result, but in Luminar Neo they're slightly different. So hue gives me this look and color gives me a look with a bit more of a, in this case there's maybe some more blues in the
• 4:18 shadows. There's a little bit of a different color cast. you can choose which one you prefer creatively, either the hue look or the color. So this is how we would do the invert method swap colors in Luminar Neo. Okay, before we move on to the next method, let us disable this layer. So I'm going
• 4:36 to right click on this layer and select hide. So we'll keep it, but it'll be hidden and we won't see the effects of that invert anymore. And our third method is the hue shift. So to do a hue shift, first thing we want to do is of course make sure we're selecting the right layer so that we're
• 4:52 making the right changes in the right place. And now that I've done that, we'll go back over to essentials and we'll select color. down at the bottom you might see this collapsed when you first open it. There's an HSL sort of extension to this panel and you can open that up and go all the way to
• 5:07 the bottom. There's a section called hue shift. grab this and this will change the hue of the entire image. So if I drag this all the way to the right, all the way to 180 degrees, I've now swapped my colors. I've got a bluish sky tone and I've got that auburn look in the trees. in addition to picking 180, I could pick any other number that I want. I could
• 5:31 slide this gradually back down the list and say I wanted a different color or a different look for my image. I could pick any of these. You can also go to the negative side. So if I go to negative 180 and then I track along the edge, you can see some different color variations there.
• 5:46 So usually some blend from negative 150 to 180 or 150 to 180 and there will produce an interesting result so that's the third method for swapping colors. talk about our fourth method. So before I do that, I'm going to go to edits and we've got this. You can see the color panel that I just added. I'm going to hit
• 6:07 undo and delete and that will remove that from our list of edits. So now I have slate to add our fourth method of color swapping, which is LUTs. add LUTS is go to the Tools panel and I'm going to scroll down to the Creative section in the Tools panel and select Mood and Mood is basically a LUT tool for loading your LUT. So I can
• 6:32 LUT I want to use here default the value is 30 but we actually want to apply these LUTs fully. So I'm just going to crank this up to 100 before I even look at them. So the benefit of the LUTs is we can add custom LUT files. So I have a couple options available for download on my website. I have a free LUT pack that has 18
• 6:54 LUTs in it with some color swap options and then I have my PRO Infrared LUTs which has 270 LUTs. So those are both available on my website and add custom LUT files to load those in. If we go down to custom LUTs you can see I've loaded in my PRO Infrared LUTs and if I go to the top here you can see the different colors. We've got Amber and Candy,
• 7:15 all the different Sky variations. We've got Split and Swap. So let's take Split that looks pretty good and we'll select that and there we go. So that is our fourth method for color swapping within Luminar Neo using LUTs this one is pretty straightforward and pretty easy to use. once you have swapped colors you've set your white balance, you've swapped colors.
• 7:38 you've got the basics of your infrared edit done and now you can do other creative things you'd like to do with your image and there's a variety of features here within Luminar Neo that you can use. I'll walk through a few of them. So for example if we go into the essential section and structure we could use
• 7:54 structure to add a little bit of contrast to an image. So you can see if I crank it up all the way that's probably too much but you know a little bit of structure will add some nice contrast to your image. So that's one option. I come down to the Landscape section and select the Landscape option within the Landscape section
• 8:14 is where my Dehaze lives. So I've got an option to increase the dehaze for my image Another thing you could think of with all of these is of course you can mask all of these individually. So there's some masking options where you can pick a whole variety of masks if you select mask AI then you can
• 8:32 try some of the different options that they have available. Sky, flora, water, natural ground. So far I've found that the AI in Luminar Neo isn't as good with infrared images. It may be that it's struggling to understand what the sky is compared to regular image. So you can see here the red indicates the sky.
• 8:53 You may have more luck with other images different different types but be aware that so far automated sort of AI based masking tools are not quite as good as a tool like say Lightroom hopefully they'll get better. another tool that we could look at is down in the Creative section. We have some
• 9:11 glow options so I'll pick the Glow tool and here in glow we've got a couple options like the Orton effect which can kind of simulate what infrared film might look like. So I could add a little bit of a glow to some of my highlights or I've got a softer version of the Orton effect here as well. So here are some of the extra
• 9:31 tools. You've got all kinds of your standard tools for editing you could use go into the develop area your curves and edit your black and white points and do all kinds of other edits that you normally would with your raw editor. Those are all available and then more creative choices are available in addition
• 9:48 Check out my website to see all the raw editors I've reviewed and how suitable each is for infrared photography. You can also download one of my LUT packs. Do you use Luminar Neo for editing infrared photography? If so, what's your favorite tip? Let us know in the comments. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared
• 10:07 photography journey, like, subscribe, or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.