Abstract We performed an HST/WFC3-IR imaging survey of the young stellar cluster NGC 2024 in three filters probing the 1.4 μ m H 2 O absorption feature, characteristic of the population of low-mass and substellar-mass objects down to a few Jupiter masses. We detect 812 point sources, 550 of them in all three filters with signal-to-noise ratio greater than 5. Using a distance-independent two-color diagram, we determine extinction values as high as A V ≃ 40. We also find that the change of effective wavelengths in our filters results in higher A V values as the reddening increases. Reconstructing a dereddened color–magnitude diagram, we derive a luminosity histogram both for the full sample of candidate cluster members and for an extinction-limited subsample containing the 50% of sources with A V ≲ 15. Assuming a standard extinction law like Cardelli et al. with a nominal R V = 3.1, we produce a luminosity function in good agreement with the one resulting from a Salpeter-like initial mass function for a 1 Myr isochrone. There is some evidence of an excess of luminous stars in the most embedded region. We posit that the correlation may be due to those sources being younger, and therefore overluminous, than the more evolved and less extincted cluster's stars. We compare our classification scheme based on the depth of the 1.4 μ m photometric feature with the results from the spectroscopic survey of Levine et al., and we report a few peculiar sources and morphological features typical of the rich phenomenology commonly encountered in young star-forming regions.