Can ultraviolet or infrared photos be printed in their “real” color?
Asked 6/6/2017
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If a camera captures light outside the visible spectrum, such as ultraviolet or infrared, can that be printed as its true color? If humans cannot see those wavelengths, what would a print look like to us? Also, when a camera shows an IR remote as a bright whitish light on the LCD, is that the real color, and can a printer reproduce it accurately?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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If humans can not see it, they can not see it.
But this kind of photography happens all the time using a device that is sensitive to that wavelength. For example Astrophotography or infrared photography.
What it is done is that the received data is reinterpreted and re-coloured.
There are not "official" colors to reinterpret the image, they can be simply random or tweaked for the specific usage.
Let's see some examples.
- This is a thermal image of a cat. Obviously, it is all infrared, and none of the temperatures shown are visible by the human eye. But it would be pointless to have a photo showing a flat red image. What we need to see is the temperature difference, so this temperature difference is shown as different visible colors. We have a scale to the right to understand what those colors mean.

- Here is a radio telescope image of radio emissions of a galaxy. To see it we need an "eye" several dozens of meters wide... That is why we use a big antenna. There is no chance any known living being can "see" this image. That is why the device simply reinterprets the colors again to something we can see and pull useful information.
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- Remember the typical Night vission googles? They images they render are normally green because the eye is more sensitive to green. Green is easier for the pilot or soldier to switch from the camera to normal view on a dark environment. But they can also be rendered grayscale.

- Finally, here is a search of near infrared photography. As you can see there are many re-interpretations of colors. Some are black and white, some colored but the choice is just an artistic render.
The specific case of the infrared controller pointing to the camera is "kind of white" if it is overexposed. I just did a quick test and I see it... reddish.
Handheld images. Do not expect overwhelming beauty. I just tested this on a Canon and a Nikon cameras. And both did the same results. If you overexpose the image you get a white dot.
Canon. 1/6 sec. You can barely see it.

10 sec. Whiteish... overexposed.
Nikon.
And a probably offtopic answer here. Can we print colors that we can not see?
If we can not see it it is not a color. The color is the interpretation on our brains of a particular wavelength. If we can not see it, the color does not exist as color, only as a different wavelength.
And yes, we can print ink that we can not see. This is used in bills on some countries, and the ink can only bee seen if it is illuminated with a particular wavelength, for example, "Black Light".
Or we could potentially print with a radioactive ink that could only be read with a Geiger counter.
Originally by user37321. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user37321
9y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Not in a way humans can see as a new visible color. If a wavelength is outside human vision, it has no directly visible “color” to us, so a normal print cannot show its true appearance to human eyes.
What usually happens is false-color rendering: the UV or IR data is mapped into visible colors so we can interpret it. Those colors are chosen for usefulness or aesthetics, not because they are the wavelength’s “real” human-visible color. That’s why thermal, infrared, and astrophotography images are often recolored.
A camera showing an IR remote as white or pale light is not revealing its true visible color; it’s just how the sensor and image processing represent infrared response.
Standard photo printers use visible inks and reproduce colors by mixing/dithering those inks, so they cannot print an actually invisible wavelength as something humans will newly perceive. However, with specialized inks or coatings, you could make a print that reflects UV or IR in a way detectable to sensors or animals that see those wavelengths. To humans, that print may still look ordinary or even invisible in those bands.
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