This activity shows how to produce an infrared composite image such as NRG, where the Red and Green channels of a picture are displayed in green and blue, respectively, and the color red is used to display a new channel -- near-infrared.

Using Photoshop to do vegetation analysis with your pictures

You can use Adobe Photoshop or another image manipulation program to composite an infrared and visible image to do vegetation/photosynthesis analysis.

To complete this activity, you'll need:

• source images, from the close to the same angle, taken at close to the same time
• one source image from a normal camera
• one source image from a camera modified to take near-infrared images
• Adobe Photoshop or the open source alternative, (GIMP)[http://gimp.org]. For some Macintosh users, Pixelmator is a powerful but lightweight option by an independent software company.
• about 30 minutes the first time; about 10 minutes once you get the hang of it

Video Tutorial

Watch this 10-minute video explaining how to align and composite your two source images. The example photos were taken from an airplane window by Stewart Long.