Kodak Aerochrome: What It Was, What It Costs Now, and How to Get the Look

By Matteo Martignago, cinematographer and colorist. Availability and prices last checked 27 July 2026.

Kodak Aerochrome is a discontinued false color infrared film, and you almost certainly cannot buy it in 2026. Both known suppliers are sold out at the same time, the last of it expired around 2010, and no manufacturer has made color infrared film since. What is left is a thin private resale market above $300 a roll, roughly ten times the 2019 price. This page covers what the film actually was, what it costs now if you find one, and how to get the look without it.

Can you still buy Kodak Aerochrome?

Not from a shop. Checked on 27 July 2026, both of the outfits that kept this film in circulation are out of it simultaneously.

Source	Status on 27 July 2026	What that means
aerochrome.shop, Dean Bennici	All five Aerochrome listings out of stock, no price displayed: Infrared 120, 120 Perforated, 127, 4×5 (18 sheets), 16mm 400ft	The historic source. Bennici hand cut most of the Aerochrome that ever reached photographers and now releases only occasional hand cut batches, the last of them in January 2025
Film Photography Project, FPP Color IR 35mm	Sold out, last listed at $69.99	Was already one roll per customer, sold as cold stored and expired with results explicitly not guaranteed
Private resale, eBay and forums	Occasional single rolls at collector prices	No condition guarantee, no returns, and provenance claims you cannot check
Any manufacturer	None	No color infrared film has been made by anyone since 2009

One fact explains why this film has always been scarce in the formats photographers use: Kodak never made it as a 120 roll. 1443 was an aerial product supplied in 70mm, 5 inch and 9.5 inch rolls for aerial camera magazines. Every 120, 127, 4×5 and 16mm Aerochrome that has ever reached a photographer was cut and respooled by hand from those master rolls. When the master rolls ran out, the supply chain ended, because there was no production line behind it.

The link is still worth having, as long as you know what you are looking at: the shop is where any future release would appear, and Bennici’s own account of cutting well over 150,000 rolls of 120 from surplus master rolls is the reason the hobbyist revival happened at all. When he did have stock, releases sold out in about three days.

What Kodak Aerochrome costs now

Expect over $300 for a roll of 120 and over $250 for a 24 exposure 35mm cassette, checked July 2026. That is more than $10 a frame before you have processed anything. There is no manufacturer price and no going rate, only asking prices for expired film that swing with seller optimism and storage claims. The trajectory is well documented, and it is the thing most worth knowing.

Date	Format	Reported price	Source
Feb 2019	120, four rolls	$160 total, about $40 a roll	35mmc, Jul 2025
Late 2023	120, private resale	About AUD 250 a roll	35mmc, Jul 2025
Mar 2025	120, eBay single	AUD 485 to AUD 575	35mmc, Jul 2025
Jul 2026	120	Over $300 a roll	35mmc, Jul 2026
Jul 2026	35mm, 24 exposures	Over $250, about $10 a frame	analog.cafe
Last listed	FPP Color IR 35mm	$69.99, now sold out	Film Photography Project

Why is Kodak Aerochrome so expensive?

Because the supply is a fixed pool that nobody can refill. Kodak never produced Aerochrome as a 120 roll, so every roll photographers have bought was hand cut from surplus aerial master rolls purchased in 2006, and those are nearly gone. The film expired around 2010 and degrades in storage, demand rose as the look spread online, and no manufacturer has made color infrared film since 2009. A shrinking pool, rising demand and no possible resupply is what took a roll from about $40 in 2019 to over $300 in 2026.

The most recent published figure, from 35mmc in July 2026, is blunt: Aerochrome is now above $300 per roll of 120. For 35mm, analog.cafe puts a 24 exposure cassette north of $250, which is over $10 a frame before you have processed anything. A first-hand account of the economics published a year earlier traces the climb precisely: four rolls for $160 in February 2019, a private resale at roughly AUD 250 a roll at the end of 2023, and eBay singles at AUD 485 to AUD 575 by March 2025.

The roll is also not the whole cost. You need a yellow filter, a camera you can load in total darkness that has no LED looking at the film inside it, and a lab willing to run expired color infrared. On a twelve frame roll of 120 at 2026 prices, you are comfortably past $25 a frame before processing.

What Kodak Aerochrome actually was

Kodak Aerochrome was a false color infrared reversal film that recorded near infrared light as red, green light as blue and red light as green, so healthy vegetation appeared magenta to scarlet. It was a survey instrument, not an art film. Kodak built color infrared for aerial reconnaissance, forestry and agriculture, where the point was to see plant health and painted camouflage that the eye cannot distinguish. The look photographers love is a side effect of an instrument doing its job.

Two products, two discontinuations, two years apart

Most articles give a single date, which conflates two different films. Kodak Ektachrome Professional Infrared EIR, the 35mm cassette most photographers actually handled, was discontinued in 2007. Kodak AEROCHROME III Infrared Film 1443, the bulk aerial product that later got hand cut into 120 rolls, lasted another two years: Kodak’s discontinuance notice is dated 19 October 2009, gave decreasing demand as the reason, and accepted final orders through 13 November 2009. Secondary coverage, including Emulsive’s review, generally rounds this to around 2010, which is where the confusion starts. Effectively all surviving stock carries 2010 or 2011 expiry.

The family is much older than either product. The 1942 ancestor was Aero Kodacolor Reversal Film, Camouflage Detection. The specific film called 1443 arrived around 2001. A page telling you Kodak made Aerochrome from 1942 to 2009 has collapsed a sixty-seven year lineage into one product.

The specification, from Kodak’s own datasheet

Specification	Kodak AEROCHROME III 1443
Type	Infrared sensitive false color reversal (slide) film
Spectral sensitivity	Ultraviolet, visible and infrared to approximately 900 nm
Nominal speed	EAFS/ISO A 40 through a Wratten 12, in Process AR-5
Practical ground rating	Commonly shot at EI 400, which is not Kodak’s figure
Primary process	AR-5 with EA-5 chemicals. E-6 is a substitute, C-41 gives a negative
Base	ESTAR, 3.9 mil (0.10 mm), with gel backing
Resolving power	63 line pairs/mm at 1.6:1 contrast, 100 lp/mm at 1000:1
Granularity	rms 23
Reciprocity	No correction needed from 1/1000 to 1/100 second
Handling	Total darkness. The base light pipes
Storage	0 to -10F, sealed, with at least 8 hours warm up before opening

Why foliage turns red

An ordinary color film has three layers sensitive to blue, green and red. Aerochrome shifts the whole set one step up the spectrum: its layers respond to green, red and near infrared, and blue is thrown away. Kodak’s definition of false color is exact, and worth reading twice: if the dye formed in a layer bears no relationship to the color of light that layer is sensitive to, the resulting colors are false.

This is also why the yellow filter is not optional. All three layers stay inherently sensitive to blue, and unlike ordinary color film, color infrared deliberately omits the internal yellow filter layer that would block it. That filtering has to happen on the lens instead. Kodak’s wording is that with the yellow filter in place, the layers act as though they are sensitive only to green, red and infrared. If the underlying idea of complementary dyes is new to you, how color relationships work covers the groundwork.

The Wood effect: why leaves reflect infrared

Healthy leaves reflect enormous amounts of near infrared, and the usual explanation, that chlorophyll reflects infrared, is wrong. Chlorophyll absorbs blue and red strongly and reflects the green in between, which is why leaves look green, and it simply stops absorbing past about 700 nm. Beyond that edge the leaf’s internal structure takes over: the spongy mesophyll is a stack of hydrated cell walls and air gaps, and the refractive index mismatch at every boundary scatters near infrared back out. Reflectance jumps from a few percent in the red to well over half in the near infrared. Chlorophyll creates the contrast; the structure creates the glow.

The effect is named after Robert Williams Wood, who published the first infrared photographs in 1910. It is the same physics behind NDVI, still the standard vegetation index in remote sensing.

It is near infrared, not heat

Kodak’s datasheet corrects this outright: thermal photography cannot be done with these films, because they are not heat detectors. Aerochrome records sunlight bouncing off surfaces, in a band just past the edge of human vision and out to about 900 nm, so it needs daylight exactly as any other film does. Thermal cameras read the radiation a subject emits, at wavelengths around 8 to 14 micrometers. A hot engine in a dark garage is a bright shape to a thermal camera and nothing at all to Aerochrome.

Which is why it was a camouflage detector

Green paint and netting reflect green light but generally not near infrared. On the film, healthy foliage goes magenta or red while painted objects render purple or blue, which was the entire point. Kodak notes the designation CD, for camouflage detection, and also concedes that later paints were formulated with spectral curves that approximate real foliage, so the arms race ran both ways. The same sensitivity is why a stressed tree shows up before it looks sick to the eye: infrared reflectance drops first.

Some predictable consequences fall out of the mapping. Deciduous canopy reflects more infrared than conifers, so broadleaf goes magenta while pines go brownish red. Water reflects almost no infrared and goes near black, while ice goes light, which is exactly why Kodak sold this for sea ice reconnaissance. And because blue light never reaches the emulsion, a sky keeps almost nothing of what your eye sees in it. What survives is the green component of skylight, recorded in the blue layer, over a sky that reflects almost no infrared, which is why skies run from deep cobalt to nearly black depending on the filter you used.

If you already own a roll

Shooting advice is close to hypothetical for most readers now, so treat this as a checklist for the case where you have found one. Everything here is from Kodak’s datasheet or from named photographers, since I have not shot it myself.

1. Yellow filter, always. A Wratten 12 is the reference. Without it, blue floods all three layers and the false color separation collapses. Orange and red filters shift the palette further, and are a creative choice rather than a substitute.
2. Do not use an R72. It is the standard infrared filter and it is the wrong tool here: on this film it gives reddish monochrome rather than the false color look.
3. Load and unload in total darkness. Not subdued light. The ESTAR base pipes light down the roll, and this ruins fresh film as readily as expired.
4. Use a manual camera with no DX code reader. The Film Photography Project warned that DX sensors can fog the film, and this is one of the most common reasons a first roll comes back blank.
5. Bracket generously. Latitude is narrow even when fresh. Reviewers describe roughly three stops of usable range, and one puts it as low as half a stop.
6. Get it processed quickly, and refrigerate it if you cannot. Kodak asks for processing as soon as possible after exposure to avoid latent image shifts.

The alternatives that actually exist

Some of the commonly recommended substitutes do not work, for reasons of physics rather than taste. If you are here because you like films that do something strange with color, CineStill 400D is a far easier place to start. Here is what is real.

Option	Records real infrared?	Cost	What you actually get
Full spectrum camera conversion plus an Aerochrome-style filter	Yes	About $100 to $400 to convert, plus $60 and up for the filter	The closest buyable equivalent. Red foliage in camera, unlimited frames, and the real infrared discriminations
Full spectrum conversion plus a 550 or 590 nm filter, then a channel swap	Yes	Conversion plus about $35 to $185	The same physics with more control and more post work
Trichrome, three filtered exposures combined	Yes	Filters only	High fidelity, but nothing in the frame may move. No wind, no water, no people
Rollei Infrared 400 or Ilford SFX 200	Partly, extended red	Normal film prices	Bright white foliage in black and white. Never the red
Lomochrome Purple	No	Normal film prices	A purple color shift that superficially resembles it. Not infrared sensitive, so it cannot produce the Wood effect
A LUT or preset on a normal photo	No	Free to cheap	The palette without the physics. Foliage that was dull green stays dull
Aviphot Chrome, Aerocolor, Aerographic Plus-X	No	9 to 18 euros	Conventional aerial films sold by the same shop. Not infrared, despite the branding

One genuinely new development is worth noting because it is the only live movement in this space. Hi-Con IR, reported in July 2026, is a true infrared film repurposed from old imagesetting stock and hand cut in a darkroom. It is black and white, so it is not a color Aerochrome replacement, but it is the first new true infrared film in years.

How to recreate Aerochrome digitally

The grade itself is one channel swap and takes about a minute. What decides the result is the file you feed it, so the routes below are ranked by that rather than by difficulty.

Why a hue shift can never work

Aerochrome performs a channel rotation with an extra input: infrared becomes red, green becomes blue, red becomes green, and blue is discarded. Three of those four moves are plumbing that any grading tool can do. The first one is not, because it needs a channel an ordinary photograph does not contain.

A hue rotation can only remap colors that are already in the file, so two things give it away immediately. A healthy leaf and a diseased leaf look nearly identical in normal color but very different in infrared, so the film separates them and a hue shift cannot. And green paint, dyed fabric and artificial turf are green to a camera but dark in infrared, so the film renders them blue or purple against red foliage while a hue shift obediently turns them pink along with everything else. The look is a spectral discrimination, not a color.

The channel swap, with the actual values

Before anything else, set a custom white balance in camera with the filter mounted, metering off grass or a gray card. This matters more than anything downstream: a full spectrum raw balanced for daylight is a solid red slab, and no swap will rescue it. Working from that capture, you exchange red and blue in a Channel Mixer.

1. Add a Channel Mixer adjustment layer. Set the Red output to R 0, G 0, B +100. Set the Blue output to R +100, G 0, B 0. Leave Green alone. Merge.
2. Add a second Channel Mixer. Set Green to R 0, G 0, B +100 and Blue to R 0, G +100, B 0. Merge. Be clear about what the two passes compose into: your finished red is the original blue, your green is the original red, and your blue is the original green. That is a full three way rotation, not a red and blue swap, and nothing is properly red yet.
3. Then work in targeted hue moves rather than global ones: nudge cyans toward a clean blue sky, pull yellows toward red to bring foliage over, and reduce black in the reds so the foliage does not go muddy.

Doing it in DaVinci Resolve

An RGB Mixer node is a three by three matrix, so it does both Photoshop passes in a single node. Zero every coefficient, then set the red output’s blue to 1.0, the green output’s red to 1.0, and the blue output’s green to 1.0. Same rotation, one step instead of two. Turn Preserve Luminance off. Leaving it on renormalizes the result and mutes the swap, and it is the single most common reason people report that the Resolve version does not match the Photoshop version.

For real control, use a Splitter/Combiner node instead. That fans the image into three single channel paths, so you can cross the connections and still drop an individual curve or key onto each channel before recombining, which is how you shape foliage density without touching the sky. Save it as a PowerGrade. If you want a refresher on the underlying controls, how offset works is a good starting point.

What digital will not give you

Even done properly, channel arithmetic does not reproduce Aerochrome’s tonal curve and narrow shoulder, its dye cloud grain, the halation around bright highlights, or the way its red rolls off into brown as infrared reflectance falls. Those are emulsion behaviors. Add grain, halation and a highlight roll off as a separate later stage rather than trying to get them out of the swap. If you are working without a grading suite, the free color grading options will all do a channel swap.

Where you have already seen it

The film reached the public through record sleeves long before photographers started hunting for rolls. Karl Ferris shot color infrared for the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, and Keith McMillan used it for Black Sabbath’s debut. That psychedelic association is most of why the look reads as it does now.

Its most serious use came later. From 2013 the photographer Richard Mosse worked in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Aerochrome cut by Dean Bennici, turning a camouflage detection film back on a conflict, and the work reached the Venice Biennale. It is worth looking up before you decide this is only a way to make trees look pink. For the photographers who own rolls and publish frames, analog.cafe and Rob Walwyn both have extensive galleries and field notes.

Is Aerochrome coming back?

There is no verifiable Kodak color infrared revival, as of July 2026. Videos and posts announcing one turn up periodically and none is backed by a Kodak announcement. Two things that are real get misread as one: Hi-Con IR is a genuine new true infrared film but it is black and white, and Kodak’s 2026 activity around Ektachrome E100 concerns an existing film that is not infrared.

The structural reason to be skeptical is simple. The hobbyist supply never came from a production line, it came from surplus aerospace master rolls bought in 2006 and hand cut over close to twenty years. That supply is all but exhausted. Restarting color infrared would mean building it from scratch for a market Kodak already left in 2009 for lack of demand.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Kodak Aerochrome cost in 2026?

Expect over $300 for a roll of 120 and over $250 for a 24 exposure 35mm cassette, which is more than $10 a frame before processing. Those are asking prices on a private resale market, not a going rate, and no shop had any in stock when this page was last checked. For context on how it got there: no more exists and none is being made. Every roll on the market was cut from aerospace surplus that ran out, the film expired around 2010, and demand grew as the look spread online. Reported prices went from about $40 a roll in 2019 to over $300 by July 2026, which is roughly tenfold in six years, for film that is degrading the whole time.

What is the difference between Aerochrome and Ektachrome Infrared?

They are two Kodak color infrared products. Ektachrome Professional Infrared EIR was the 35mm cassette and was discontinued in 2007. AEROCHROME III 1443 was the bulk aerial film, discontinued in October 2009, and it is the one later hand cut into the 120 rolls most photographers bought. Articles that give one discontinuation date for both are conflating them.

Can Aerochrome see heat?

No. Kodak’s datasheet is explicit that these films are not heat detectors and cannot be used for thermal photography. Aerochrome records reflected sunlight in a band just past what the eye can see, so it needs daylight and shows nothing in an unlit room.

Is Lomochrome Purple the same as Aerochrome?

No, and this is the most common substitution error. Lomochrome Purple is available new and shifts foliage toward purple, which looks superficially similar. But it is not infrared sensitive, so it cannot produce the Wood effect that makes Aerochrome work. The glow in a real Aerochrome frame comes from near infrared reflectance that Lomochrome Purple physically cannot record.

What filter do I need for Aerochrome?

A yellow filter, with the Wratten 12 as the reference. It absorbs blue, which is what allows the three layers to act as green, red and infrared records. Do not use an R72 infrared filter for this film: it produces reddish monochrome rather than the false color separation people want.

Can I get the Aerochrome look with a preset?

You can get the palette, not the physics. A preset remaps colors already in your file and cannot invent the infrared channel your sensor filtered out, so healthy and stressed foliage stay identical and green painted objects turn pink instead of blue. For a genuine recreation you need a full spectrum converted camera and an infrared filter, or a trichrome of filtered exposures.