I have some photos that are bleh in color, and a bit less than bleh in black and white. What to do, what to do.

What I learned at the CS3 Power Tour:

7. Not too happy with how your photos look in color or black and white? Try infrared faked in Photoshop. It just may be what you’re looking for.

I was scanning through my old shots to find a nice one with enough bright, sharp foliage to test out the infrared technique. I’d been going through some infrared photos in Flickr, and a number of them are simply amazing. But I was slowly getting frustrated with my inability to make them look at least a little bit like the ones I had seen on Flickr.

While I don’t know yet how to realistically recreate that true infrared white glowing foliage effect (is it even possible done solely in Photoshop?), I discovered that it can do wonders for those in-between shots.

Here’s one I took some years ago, straight out of my first digital camera (a 1.3 Olympus that probably cost more then than my Canon S5 now). This was Pebble Beach in Monterey, California. Which happens to be my favorite place ever in the world, other than home, of course.

I liked it enough to keep it, obviously. But I clearly didn’t know what do with it.

So I followed the easy step in my CS3 Power Tour workbook to fake the infrared look. And yes, I said “step” because that’s all it took – just one Channel mixer adjustment, and I was good to go.

I thought it turned out pretty well, and much better than a straightforward black and white conversion. Here’s another one from that same trip:

Now, I know the foliage should be white, but hey, don’t those rocks look cool?