▶︎ Tutorials — learn by doing on real infrared photos
Quick start
Open image(s) (or pick a practice photo). RAW — NEF or DNG — unlocks the full color range.
Pick several and they become a session : a strip of previews along the bottom, tap to switch,
each photo keeping its own edit — held safely, so a closed tab offers to Resume right where you were
(masks and imported LUTs are the two things a resume can't restore — they reset with a fresh open;
re-apply a LUT in a tap from Profiles & LUTs).
Done (on the strip) ends the session and frees the space.Quick look a folder (start screen) when you just want to see what's in a set:
an instant grid of auto-balanced previews, nothing saved. Tap the keepers and Keep in a session
sends them straight into an editable session.On open, raw photos are auto-balanced (white balance, exposure, denoise, and blown-highlight recovery when the frame needs it); JPEG/HEIC open as the camera rendered them, with measured denoise only. Hold: Untouched shows the bare decode any time.
Tap foliage in the photo to fine-tune white balance — the classic IR move.Pick a Look , adjust sliders to taste, then Export & Save .
Gestures
Tap the photo — set white balance from that point (aim at foliage). While a picture tool is armed — Heal, a color pick, brush painting or drag-to-adjust — that tool takes the tap instead.Pinch — zoom (up to 8×); drag to pan while zoomed. No touchscreen? Use the + / − / Fit buttons in the photo's bottom-right corner, or the mouse wheel over the photo — both work even while you're brushing, so you can zoom right in to edit up close.Press & hold the photo (or the Hold: Original button) — compare with how the photo opened. Hold: Untouched shows the bare decode with nothing applied.
Top bar
Undo / Redo — step back and forward through your edit, one gesture per step. A fresh edit after an undo starts a new path forward.Reset — the whole edit returns to how the photo first opened (the auto baseline).Histogram — a live RGB + luminance readout floating over the photo. Tap the histogram itself to tuck it away; the button brings it back.
Looks & adjustments
Looks are one-tap recipes; every slider stays live afterwards so you can push further.
Looks tagged R⇆B use the red⇆blue channel swap —
the move that makes IR sky blue and foliage red/gold. Toggle the swap button to see its effect on any look.
HIE glow is film-style halation — the HIE B&W look uses it, and the slider layers it onto any other look too.
Black & white (its own B&W tab) — made for 720nm shots — turns the photo mono, with
weight sliders (or a named mix) choosing how much of each channel becomes brightness. While it's on, the Color
mixer's Luminance and Drag on photo to adjust brighten or darken each color's grey, like a classic
B&W mix. It rides saved looks and bakes into .cube exports (.dcp can't carry it).
Per-color moves the Sky and Foliage color bands independently — e.g.
Aerochrome, then Sky hue +40 for a deeper sky without touching the trees. The bands follow the
subject through a channel swap (Sky keeps meaning sky); the small text under each box shows the
colors it's grabbing right now.
Share a look from any My-looks slot (the ⋯ button): a link, a small
.ipslook file, a paste-able code, or a QR code to scan in person — the whole grade
travels inside, nothing is uploaded. Exported JPEGs carry their look recipe too
(switch it off in Export if you prefer): anyone opening one here is offered your look. Honest
caveat: apps that recompress images — Photos edits, Messages optimization, social uploads — strip
the recipe; a link, file, code or QR always survives.
Which color tool when?
The color tools stack from broadest to most surgical — reach for the smallest one that does the job:
Channel swap — flips the whole color world at once (red⇆blue). The IR move.Hue shift — rotates every color together, as far as you like. Use this for big moves: getting a color family into the right neighborhood.Per-color (Sky / Foliage) — each box owns half the color wheel, and they follow the swap.Color mixer — eight chips for surgery on one color. Use Pick color from photo : tap the button, tap the photo, and the chip owning that exact on-screen color selects itself.
A mixer chip bends only its own neighborhood on purpose: photos hold smooth color gradients
(a sky drifts from cyan to blue), and nearby colors must land near each other or those gradients
tear into visible bands. That's why a chip's Hue reaches ±60° and fades toward its
neighbors — it's what keeps the adjustment invisible-clean. When one chip's reach isn't enough,
make the big move with Hue shift first, then finish with the chip.
Grade — wheels, toned mono, grain & vignette
The Grade tab tints the picture by brightness instead of by color: one wheel each for
Shadows , Midtones and Highlights . Drag a
wheel's dot out from the centre — direction picks the colour, distance the strength — or use
each wheel's Hue and Amount sliders (same control, keyboard-friendly). Balance
hands more of the picture to the shadow or highlight wheel. The classic move: highlights toward
gold, shadows toward blue.
The wheels tone Black & white frames too — that's the Toned mono row:
Sepia, Selenium, Cyanotype, Gold and Split switch on B&W and tint it like the darkroom
papers they're named for.
The Channel mixer is the full recipe behind the R⇆B swap: build each
output channel (red, green, blue) from any blend of the three inputs. Start from a preset —
Aerochrome, Copper, a channel Rotate — then fine-tune the nine sliders for invented false-color
palettes. Unlike grain and vignette, the mixer is pure color: it bakes into both .cube and .dcp
exports.
Stickers — UFOs in the trees Beta
In the Stickers tab, tap a sticker to drop it on the photo, then drag it into
place. A sticker sits on top of the picture with its own colours — it's a
different kind of image, so it is not pushed through the infrared processing (grain still
settles over the top). To help it belong, Match the photo's colours shifts the
sticker into the scene's infrared palette in its own layer — it is never run through the
infrared processing, which would just cook it. Peek behind lets the scene show
through: pick whether the sticker hides behind the bright parts (glowing foliage) or the dark
parts (tree trunks), so a saucer can tuck in behind the branches. Resize and rotate right
on the photo: a selected sticker shows corner handles (drag to resize) and a round knob on
a stem above it (drag to spin) — or use the Size and Spin sliders, or two fingers. Every
sticker in the picker shows a little preview with its name so you can tell them apart.
Blend into the photo can be turned off for stickers that look better with their
own colours. Remove or Clear all start over. Stickers stay with the one photo — they aren't
carried by saved looks, batch, or the .cube / .dcp exports.
Grain adds film texture (Size sets how coarse), and Vignette
darkens (left) or lifts (right) the frame's edges — it follows your crop, unlike the Corrections
vignette, which fixes the lens on the full frame. Everything here rides saved looks, sessions and
batch. Exports: the wheels bake into .cube files; grain and vignette don't (a .cube carries colour
only) — and .dcp can't carry any of it.
Warp — bend the picture Beta
The Warp tab pushes the picture around with your finger. Pick a tool and
drag on the photo: Push smears pixels along your stroke, Swirl
twists them, Pinch draws them inward and Bloat pushes them out.
Brush size sets how much each drag grabs, Strength how hard; every drag is one undo, so
experiment freely and Reset warp when you want the picture back. Like crop and healing, warp
bends the picture itself, so it stays with this photo — it isn't carried by saved looks,
batch or the .cube / .dcp exports.
Light & area tools
Clarity — punches up local structure (or softens, pulled left). Dehaze — cuts the veil that flattens distant subjects; brightness-only, so colors stay put.Sharpen & Texture (Basic) — Sharpen crisps fine edges; Texture works the mid-size surface structure (left smooths it). Both are luminance-only, so colors never shift.Tone curve + Luminance — the curve shapes blacks through highlights; Luminance lifts or drops the whole image without clipping either end.Masks — radial, gradient, painted brush, tap-a-color, or automatic sky: local adjustments for one area only. Masks belong to the photo; saved looks stay portable.Dust & spots (Corrections tab) — arm Heal spots and tap a dust mote: it's patched from clean pixels nearby, in the preview and the export alike. Visualize spots makes dust jump out of flat skies; Find spots automatically sweeps the smooth areas, heals what it finds, and rings every fix for review — tap a ring to put that one back. Heals belong to the photo — they never ride in saved looks, profiles or a batch.IR lens fixes (Corrections tab) — pulls down the center hot-spot IR-converted lenses produce, and corrects (or adds) corner vignette.Crop & rotate (panel tab) — three one-tap tools, each with its own Done : Rotate 90° turns the whole photo; Crop shows the box with a rule-of-thirds grid — drag a corner to resize, drag the photo to slide it under the box; Straighten adds a fine alignment grid and a degree slider — line a horizon up against the grid (the crop auto-shrinks so no empty corner shows). Pinch to zoom the view while either tool is open. A view onto the photo, not a re-bake — masks and healed spots stay exactly where they are underneath. Composition-specific: never rides in saved looks, profiles or a batch.
Profiles & LUTs
.cube bakes your color look for Photoshop/video apps — including any imported LUT,
so the file is your full on-screen look. You can also import any .cube LUT and blend it over
your grade with a strength slider; a saved look remembers its LUT, and it rides into Batch process too.
.dcp is a Lightroom camera profile (beta) — it can't carry imported LUTs (it's a camera
profile, not a look file). Denoise, glow, sharpen, texture, clarity, dehaze, masks and heals are spatial effects and can't ride along in profiles.
Works with
JPEG/PNG from any camera · HEIC (in Safari) · RAW from any Bayer-sensor camera converted to DNG
(free Adobe DNG Converter, or Lightroom's Convert to DNG) · Nikon NEF natively
(classic compressed; not High-Efficiency — Z8/Z9 and the Z50 II's HE / HE* files need converting to DNG first) · Fujifilm X-Trans not supported.
Tuned on an IR-converted Nikon Z50.
Saves: JPEG in Display P3 (the exact colors you see, wide-gamut tagged) and 16-bit TIFF in sRGB (the safest hand-off into other editors).
Exports keep the photo's capture date, camera, lens and exposure (when the original carries them) — never its location.
Why the Files picker hangs
You pick a folder of raw files, tap Open , and nothing happens for a long time with
nothing on screen to say why. That wait is not this app. Everything you see until the
picker closes belongs to iOS: this app is not running, has not been handed a single file, and has no way
to draw anything over Apple's picker. The first moment it can say anything is the spinner that appears
once the picker closes.
What iOS is doing is fetching your selection out of iCloud Drive. When storage runs short, iOS evicts
the local copy of a file and keeps only a stub; the picker has to pull the real bytes back down before it
can hand them over, and it does that for every file you selected before it returns even one. A
folder of 40 raw files is a gigabyte or more over whatever connection you are on.
How to tell, and what to do:
In the picker, a file with a cloud badge beside its name is not on the iPad. One
with no badge is local and opens immediately. The picker cannot sort or filter by this — the badge is
the only signal Apple gives you.
Download the folder before you open it. In the Files app, touch and hold the
folder (or the selected files) and choose Download Now . Wait for the badges to
disappear, then come back here.Keep it local. iCloud Drive’s settings carry an Optimize iPad
Storage switch — that is the one doing the evicting. Turning it off keeps shoots on the
device. (Apple has moved where it sits more than once, so look for it under iCloud in Settings rather
than a fixed path.)Pick fewer at a time. The picker fetches every selected file before it returns
anything, so six files start editing far sooner than sixty.“Waiting…” with an up arrow means the opposite — that file is
queued to upload to iCloud, so a local copy does exist. The picker can still be slow to release
it while iCloud is mid-transfer. Letting the upload finish clears it.
You only pay it once per set. As a session opens, this app copies each photo’s
original bytes into its own storage on the iPad — that is what lets a session survive a reload, a crash,
or the tab being discarded. So going back to those photos later is Resume session on the
start screen, which touches neither iCloud nor the picker. Ending a session with Done is
what throws that copy away.
Batch process — develop a whole set at once
Open image(s) is for editing (one photo, or a few as a session);
Batch process is for output — it develops a whole set unattended and hands you a .zip.
Tap it (in the top bar next to Open image(s) , or on the start screen) and it first asks
what goes on every photo : your current edit (the grade on screen — offered only when
a photo is open), a saved look from My looks, a built-in look (Aerochrome,
Goldie, B&W IR…), or Auto-balance only — no look at all, just each photo properly
white-balanced and exposed, which is the quickest way to preview a whole folder and see what you've got.
Then pick the files. Each photo is auto-balanced on its own (its own white balance, exposure, denoise and
lens hot-spot fix) with the chosen grade layered on top. The set comes back as one .zip
you save in a single tap, at the Format and Resolution set in Export. (White balance is per-photo, so this is
for a shoot in one style; the exact frame on screen isn't copied pixel-for-pixel.)
What rides along, and what doesn't: a batch carries the creative look only.
Masks (radial, gradient, brush) and the IR lens fixes sliders —
Hot-spot, its size, and Vignette — are tied to one specific frame, so they do not carry into a
batch. Instead every photo gets its own hot-spot correction chosen from its EXIF lens; a photo whose
lens isn't in the EXIF is processed without that fix, and the finish summary counts how many that was
(RAW frames skip it too — the hot-spot profiles are JPEG-only for now).
Every finished photo is saved to the app's own storage as it completes , so nothing is
ever lost: you can stop mid-run and keep what's done, tap Continue to
resume the rest, and if the app ever crashes or is closed mid-batch, the start screen offers to
recover the finished images next time you open it. If the device runs out of storage
mid-batch, it stops the same gentle way — save the .zip to free space, then Continue.
Install as an app — one, two, or three
On iPad/iPhone: open the page you want to install, tap Safari's Share button
(the square with the arrow), then Add to Home Screen . You get a full-screen app
with its own icon that works offline. On Android/Chrome, use the browser's Install app
menu entry.
You're in the installed app right now — it has no Safari Share button,
and links can't leave the app either, so Add to Home Screen can't be reached from here.
Copy the Infrared link
then open Safari , paste it in the address bar, and tap
Share → Add to Home Screen there.
Infrared and Macro Studio are separate tools under one Studio launcher
(the ‹ in the top-left goes back to it), and you choose what to install:
This tool alone — install from here and its icon opens straight into the Infrared editor, no menu.The whole Studio — install from the ‹ Studio launcher instead: one icon, then pick Infrared or Macro each time.Both, or all three — install any mix; each is independent, so the Infrared app never carries the Macro engine and vice-versa.
You can add or remove any of them later — installing one never blocks the others.
Tips
Import from Files , not the Photo Library — iOS silently converts RAW to JPEG there. A zipped RAW also works.
Scenes with big empty dark skies take more Contrast; scenes with shadow detail (roads, dark trees) look best gentle.
720nm-filter shots are near-monochrome by nature — that's what B&W IR, Sepia IR and HIE B&W are for.
A 🛰 Location saved tip appears when the opened file carries GPS location — tap it to save the file (or a copy) without it. In Settings (ⓘ) you can hide the tip or have location removed automatically on open. Exports from the editor never include location.
Studio