Quick start

1. Open image (or pick an example). RAW — NEF or DNG — unlocks the full color range.
2. On open, the app automatically sets white balance, exposure and denoise from the photo itself.
3. Tap foliage in the photo to fine-tune white balance — the classic IR move.
4. Pick a Look, adjust sliders to taste, then Export & Save.

Gestures

• Tap the photo — set white balance from that point (aim at foliage).
• Pinch — zoom (up to 8×); drag to pan while zoomed.
• Press & hold the photo (or the Hold: Original button) — compare with the original.

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.

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.

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.

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.
• Tone curve + Luminance — the curve shapes blacks through highlights; Luminance lifts or drops the whole image without clipping either end.
• Masks — radial, gradient, or painted brush: local adjustments for one area only. Masks belong to the photo; saved looks stay portable.
• IR lens fixes — pulls down the center hot-spot IR-converted lenses produce, and corrects (or adds) corner vignette.

Profiles

.cube bakes your color look for Photoshop/video apps. .dcp is a Lightroom camera profile (beta). Denoise and glow 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 Z8/Z9 High-Efficiency) · Fujifilm X-Trans not supported. Tuned on an IR-converted Nikon Z50.

Process many at once

Tap Process many (in the top bar next to Open image, or on the start screen) and pick a whole set. Each photo is auto-balanced on its own (its own white balance, exposure, denoise and lens hot-spot fix), then your current look — the creative grade you've dialled in: swap, hue, tone, mixer, clarity and so on — is layered on top of every frame. 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.

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.