Kodak Aerochrome — The Impossible Color of Conflict
Few photographic materials have ever looked as unreal — or as psychologically unsettling — as Kodak Aerochrome. Forests turned crimson, vegetation glowed electric pink, landscapes appeared radioactive, and the familiar world transformed into something suspended between dream, hallucination, and surveillance imagery. What began as a military reconnaissance film eventually became one of the most mythologized materials in photographic history, not only because of its extraordinary colors, but because of the strange emotional dissonance those colors created.
Aerochrome was never originally intended for artistic photography. Developed by Kodak during the Cold War, the film was designed for aerial and military use. Because infrared light reflects strongly from chlorophyll, healthy vegetation appeared bright red or pink on the film, allowing military analysts to distinguish camouflage from real plant life. Hidden structures, concealed military positions, and environmental changes could suddenly become visible through the unnatural tonal shifts of infrared photography.
Yet once artists and photographers began experimenting with the material outside of military contexts, Aerochrome revealed something far stranger. The film did not simply document landscapes differently — it destabilized reality itself.
Trees became blood red.
Fields glowed magenta.
Human skin shifted unpredictably.
The natural world appeared both beautiful and contaminated at the same time.
Unlike ordinary color photography, Aerochrome seemed to remove the comforting familiarity of the visible world and replace it with something emotionally ambiguous. The landscapes felt simultaneously seductive and threatening, utopian and apocalyptic.
Among the contemporary artists most closely associated with Aerochrome is Richard Mosse, whose work transformed the film into one of the defining visual languages of modern conflict photography. In his series Infra, photographed in eastern Congo, Mosse used Aerochrome to depict war zones through surreal pink jungles and luminous crimson vegetation. The effect was deeply disorienting. Violence and political instability were rendered through colors normally associated with beauty, fantasy, or romanticism, creating a tension that forced viewers to confront the strange aesthetics through which conflict is often consumed visually.
Mosse understood that the power of Aerochrome was not simply visual spectacle. The film exposed how photography itself shapes emotional perception. By transforming battlefields into almost dreamlike environments, the images disrupted the familiar visual language of documentary photography and made viewers see conflict differently. Beauty became inseparable from unease.
Long before Aerochrome entered the contemporary art world, photographers, scientists, and experimental artists had already been fascinated by infrared photography’s ability to reveal invisible structures beneath ordinary appearances. Throughout the twentieth century, infrared imagery occupied a strange territory between science, surveillance, and artistic experimentation. But Aerochrome pushed these possibilities further because of its uniquely aggressive color palette. The film did not merely alter reality subtly. It rebuilt reality into something psychologically unstable.
Part of what made Aerochrome so extraordinary was its technical complexity. The film recorded infrared wavelengths beyond normal human vision, translating invisible light into visible color shifts. Because infrared reflection changes dramatically depending on vegetation, atmosphere, humidity, skin tone, and light conditions, the results often felt unpredictable and chemically alive. Photographers could never fully control the film. Weather, sunlight, foliage, filters, and exposure all interacted in unstable ways, meaning Aerochrome images frequently carried an element of accident and discovery that digital photography rarely reproduces naturally.
This unpredictability became central to the film’s mythology. Aerochrome photographs often feel less like conventional images and more like fragments from an alternate psychological reality. The landscapes appear transformed by contamination, memory, dream logic, or environmental collapse. In many cases, the emotional effect emerges precisely because the colors remain impossible to fully rationalize.
Even decades after Kodak discontinued the film, Aerochrome’s influence continues to expand across photography, cinema, fashion, music videos, and digital color grading. Contemporary visual culture remains deeply fascinated by infrared aesthetics because they challenge one of photography’s oldest assumptions: that the camera simply records the visible world objectively. Aerochrome instead reveals how fragile our sense of reality actually is.
Modern digital photography frequently attempts to recreate the Aerochrome look through infrared conversions, color channel manipulation, and experimental grading techniques, but much of the deeper emotional power of the original film came from its chemical unpredictability. The colors felt unstable because the process itself was unstable. The images carried a sense that reality had slipped slightly out of alignment.
This fascination with Aerochrome’s surreal tonal world became one of the foundations behind the development of Aero Infrared. Rather than pursuing a purely nostalgic simulation of infrared film, the collection was shaped around some of the emotional characteristics that made Aerochrome imagery so visually unforgettable: contaminated color separation, luminous reds and magentas, unstable tonal relationships, atmospheric contrast, and the sensation that familiar landscapes have quietly transformed into something otherworldly.
Particular attention was placed on preserving depth within shadows and vegetation while allowing colors to remain cinematic rather than artificially exaggerated. The ambition behind Aero Infrared was not simply to imitate a discontinued material, but to reconnect digital photography with a more experimental and psychologically charged visual language — one where color itself becomes capable of unsettling perception and transforming ordinary environments into images that feel suspended somewhere between documentary reality and hallucination.
AERO INFRARED was created with inspiration from the Kodak Aerochrome film. Kodak Aerochrome was a false-color infrared film sensitive to the color spectrum and infrared light. Photographer Richard Mosse as well as fashion and art photographers used this film over the years.
Aero Infrared profile-based preset gives you that wonderful color palette from Aerochrome. The more green you have in the picture the more pink and red you get. With our black and white preset you get the best result with a heavy blue sky (see the example). The preset is skin tone safe.
What is in the pack?
Two specially designed profiles (portrait & landscape)
7 infrared presets for color pictures
2 infrared presets for black and white
Two grain presets - one for 35mm film look and one for 120mm film look.
Remember - You can adjust the amount of profile effect by pulling the profile slider in the develop panel (at the top). No preset can give you a perfect result with one click - depending on your camera, exposure, light, and composition the result will differ. Use the different tools inside Lightroom to adjust exposure and contrast and you will have a great result.
IMPORTANT NOTICE This Lightroom presets is compatible with Adobe Lightroom versions of:
Adobe Lightroom CC
Adobe Lightroom Classic
Adobe Photoshop CC (Camera Raw filter)
Adobe Lightroom Mobile App (you will need a Creative Cloud subscription to import the profiles. You can do this by importing through the Lightroom CC desktop app and they will appear in your mobile app)
Please make sure you have the correct software before your purchase - refunds can NOT be given for digital downloads. Also, make sure to update your Lightroom to the latest version, so it can handle the included profile. (Older versions of Lightroom might have problems finding profiles).