Redscale the Post-Pro Way

Wild Grasses. Canon PowerShot SD780 IS.
Full-color image, post-processed.

I thought for sure I could search for a post-pro redscale effect and come up with something better than what I had originally created. Simply using the Channel Mixer adjustment layer in the RGB space seemed, well, too simple. But it seems to nail it every time.

Flowers. Nikon D90, Voigtländer Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL IIS.
Full-color image, post-processed.

Hybiscus. Nikon D90, AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4G.
Full-color image, post-processed.

The actions I found simply skew everything towards red. That’s not what redscale actually does; Rescale filters out the cyan component, and that’s best done by accessing the channels directly, not by skewing color with Hue/Saturation as in some of the actions I found. You can vary the effect by using either the Normal Blend Mode or the Color blend mode, and skewing the white balance towards yellow beforehand tends to accentuate the greens. I’m hesitant to admit it, but this seems far more successful than shooting through an orange or tobacco filter, as I have also experimented with. Keeping the greens vivid seems to be an essential part of this process to me, and the filter technique seems to take its toll on them.