Infrared Photography Studio

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 are the one thing a resume can't restore — they reset with a fresh open; an imported LUT comes back with its photograph as long as it is still stored on this device). Done (on the strip) ends the session and frees the space.
Quick look a folder (top bar, and on the 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, blown-highlight recovery when the frame needs it, and Restore depth); JPEG/HEIC open as the camera rendered them, with measured denoise only — until you pick a Look, which balances them first, because a false-colour look needs colours something has already pulled apart. A camera file with all its colour in ONE band is the exception: balancing it invents the second band by crushing red, so the app leaves it alone, says so beside the looks, and offers Balance it anyway if you want that rendering on that photograph. Every one of those lands on a slider you can see and undo, your original file is never changed, and Hold: the bare decode on the Basic tab shows the photograph with those automatics off any time.
Tap foliage in the photo to fine-tune white balance — the classic IR move. Tapping a blown-out spot is refused and says so: there is no colour recorded in it to balance from.
The usual shortcuts work. Cmd/Ctrl + Z undoes and Cmd + Shift + Z (or Ctrl + Y) redoes. You can drag photos onto the window or paste one to open it. Esc closes any panel, and on a home-screen install the Back gesture closes the panel instead of leaving the app.
Double-tap any slider to put it back where the photo opened. Most of them don't start at zero — white balance, exposure and denoise open at values measured from your frame — so this returns that one slider to its opening value, the way Reset does for all of them at once. Quality goes back to its usual setting instead, since that one is yours rather than the photo's. Restore depth strength goes back to 100% — the full correction worked out for the frame in front of you, which is where every photo opens. Lens correction strength goes back to 1, the full correction, for the same reason, or to 0 on a photo whose lens has no profile.
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: Before button) — compare with how the photograph opened, which is the before/after every editor has. Two more holds live beside what they explain rather than in the bar: Hold: the bare decode on the Basic tab, under the automatics it takes off, and Hold: without the lens fix on the Corrections tab, which is only there when a lens correction is actually on the frame.

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, black & white, and sharing one

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.

Aerochrome and Pink IR are two different mappings, not two strengths. The film's three layers were sensitive to green, red and infrared, with a yellow filter throwing blue away, so no two-channel swap can express what it did. The Aerochrome look is the swap plus a nine-number channel mix measured against six real frames, then a colour mix and two sky steps — red foliage under a blue sky. It also asks for a little more noise reduction than your photo measured for itself, because the colour and the grain in an infrared frame come out of the same place and rise together; the Denoise slider shows it and you can pull it back. Pink IR is the red⇆blue swap with saturation — the pink-and-teal rendering this app has always had. Bold Pink is Aerochrome stopped before its colour mix and its sky steps: the same swap and channel mix, left magenta-pink over a green-teal sky. Restore depth still lifts its tone and foliage and leaves its sky as it is. None of the three is more correct than the others; they are different pictures, and each is one press away. The film's own bare three-way rotation is still on the Grade tab as the Film rotation mixer preset, if you want it without the rest.

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.json 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.

The automatics: Restore depth and Recover highlights

Restore depth (IR tab) is the one automatic that is not just a measurement. An infrared frame very often opens FLAT — low contrast, washed colour — because the light it was made from does not spread across the channels the way visible light does. Restore depth puts that contrast and colour back: it works out how far this particular photograph is from a reference, and moves it there. It is on by default, it runs again whenever you press a Look, and everything it does lands on the Tone and Sky/Foliage sliders where you can see it and take it back. Strength scales the whole correction: 100% is the full amount worked out for the frame in front of you — which is why every photo opens there — and lower leaves more of the picture as it arrived. 0% is the same as switching it off. If a frame looks overdone, pull Strength down rather than reaching for contrast.

Recover highlights (Basic tab) is for areas the sensor genuinely clipped — a blown sky, a hot window — where one or more channels stopped recording before the others did, so the area goes an untrue colour rather than clean white. It takes that untrue colour out for your current white balance and keeps the area's brightness: where every colour clipped the area goes clean neutral, and where only one did, the colour the others recorded stays. It re-aims itself live as you rebalance. It is set automatically at open when a raw frame actually has clipping, and sits at 0 when it does not. It cannot invent detail that was never recorded — it fixes the COLOUR of a blown area, not its texture.

White balance, one channel at a time

Red, Green and Blue gain (Basic tab) are white balance itself, one channel at a time, on a log track. An automatic balance puts the least-boosted channel at 1x and the other two above it, as raw developers do, and leaves brightness to Exposure. Tapping foliage in the photo sets all three at once, keeping the spot you tapped as bright as it was, and is the usual way in; the sliders are there for when you want to nudge one channel on its own, or push past what any ordinary editor allows — which is the whole reason this app exists, since infrared needs a balance far outside the visible-light range. Auto white balance rebalances to the photo's own neutral, and is the quick way back out of a look's colour cast without losing anything else — Exposure moves only to keep the picture as bright as it was.

The coloured disc in the sky, and measuring your lens

The coloured disc in the sky — a soft round patch of a different colour in the middle of a plain area, usually only visible once a Look is on. It is the lens, not the photo. An IR-converted lens sends a little more infrared straight up the middle than it does to the corners, so the centre of the frame is both brighter and a slightly different colour; the red⇆blue swap every colour look is built on takes that small tint and turns it into a disc you cannot miss. Remove hot-spot (Corrections tab) pulls the brightness down and does nothing at all to the colour — that is what Centre colour beside it is for. Set Hot-spot size so the circle covers the patch, then move Centre colour until the disc goes flat. Which direction helps depends on the look you have on, since the look may have swapped the channels underneath; nudge it one way and go the other if the disc gets stronger. It works over exactly the same circle as the brightness fix, so the two can be set together. This is a per-lens, per-frame correction, so it stays with this photo — it is not carried by a saved look.

Measuring your own lens. Setting the slider by eye on every photograph is the fallback, not the answer. The test page — the version number in the ⓘ panel, then Measure a lens — works the hot-spot out from photographs of nothing: four or five frames of clear sky filling the whole frame, at each focal length you use, no sun in shot and nothing blown. It reads the lens and focal length out of the files, measures how the centre differs from the edges in each colour separately, and hands you a small block of numbers. RAW or JPEG both work and the RAW is better. Nothing is uploaded and nothing leaves your device — the photographs stay here and only the numbers come out, which is the whole point of measuring on the device rather than sending the files somewhere.

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 (the film's own three-way rotation: red from blue, green from red, blue from green), Copper, a channel cycle the other way round — 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. Pick a mask, in the list or on the row of names above the tabs, and Exposure, Warmth, Hue shift, Saturation, Contrast, the Sky and Foliage bands, the colour mixer and the grade wheels act on that area, added to the whole photo's; Back to whole photo in the heading returns them. The other controls wait until you go back. 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 and updates as you heal — a fix that still leaves a ring there was smaller than the dust, so raise Spot size; 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, takes the colour out of it as well (the disc that shows up in a plain sky once a Look is on), and corrects (or adds) corner vignette.
Crop & straighten (panel tab) — three one-tap tools, each with its own Done: Rotate 90° turns the whole photo in quarter turns and nothing else; 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, from Manage your LUTs (on the start screen, in the (i) panel, and on Grade); a saved look remembers its LUT, and it rides into Develop unattended too. .dcp is a Lightroom camera profile (beta) — it can't carry imported LUTs (it's a camera profile, not a look file). It carries this photograph's infrared white point: Lightroom's Temp slider stops at 2,000 K, which is not low enough for infrared with an ordinary profile, so this one moves daylight to the white the app balanced to. In Lightroom, set Temp to about 6,500 K, or click something neutral with the White Balance dropper. 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.

Seeing more of your files while you pick

The picker that opens when you tap Open image(s) is Apple's, not this app's. Its size is Safari's decision and no web page can change it — so it cannot be made to fill the screen from in here. Two things do help.

Switch the picker to a list. The four-square button at its top right toggles between big icons and a compact list, and the list shows several times as many names at once. It is Apple's control and it remembers your choice.
Use Quick look instead (top bar, and on the start screen). You pick the folder once, and the browsing happens in this app's own grid, which does fill the screen — bigger previews, developed rather than raw thumbnails, and you tap the keepers to send them into a session. When you know what you are looking for, the small picker is fine; when you are looking through a shoot, this is the one to reach for.

Why the Files picker hangs (iPhone, iPad)

This one is about iPhone and iPad. On Android, Windows, Mac or Linux the file picker hands files over straight away and none of the below applies.

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 device yet. 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 iPhone/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 your device — 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.

If the Files window closes by itself and then nothing opens

Searching inside the Files window — typing a letter, then picking This iPad or a folder — can make iOS close the window on its own. When that happens iOS is still holding on to a window that has gone, and every Open button in this app does nothing when you press it. It is not that your taps are being missed; the app is never told the window closed.

The app notices this now — two presses in a row that open no window — and offers to reload, which usually clears it without leaving the app. If the window still does not come back after a reload, close Safari or the app fully (swipe it away in the app switcher) and open it again: on one phone that was what cleared it. Your photos and edits are stored and are still there afterwards; neither loses any work. The ⓘ report's File pickers line counts windows opened against windows that came back, so if it happens the report says so.

Develop unattended — a whole set at once, into one .zip

Open image(s) is for editing (one photo, or a few as a session); Develop unattended (it was called Batch process) is for output — it develops a whole set 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, Bold Pink, Pink IR, 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 — Remove 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 — RAW and rendered files alike, and interpolated to the frame's own focal length rather than snapped to the nearest one measured. A photo whose lens isn't in the EXIF is processed without that fix, and the finish summary counts how many that was.

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

You get a full-screen icon that works offline. Open the page you want, then:

iPhone, iPad — Safari's Share button, then Add to Home Screen.
Android — Chrome usually offers it; otherwise the ⋮ menu → Install app.
Windows, Mac, Linux — Chrome or Edge — the install icon at the right of the address bar, or the browser menu → Install.
Mac — Safari — File → Add to Dock.
Firefox — cannot install web apps on a computer. It works normally in the browser; nothing is missing except the icon.

Removing it again

Worth knowing before you install: an installed app is not a shortcut, so unpinning it from a taskbar or dock does not remove it.

iPhone, iPad — hold the icon, Remove App, Delete App. This deletes its saved sessions too.
Android — hold the icon, Uninstall.
Chrome — open chrome://apps, right-click it, Remove.
Edge — open edge://apps, then Uninstall. On Windows it is also listed under Settings → Apps.
Mac — Safari — delete it from your Applications folder like any other app.

Removing the app does not touch photos you have exported. Where the browser also offers to clear its data, that is what erases saved sessions and looks.

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.

What is kept on this device, and what clears it

Nothing here is uploaded and there is no account, so everything the app remembers is in this browser, on this device. That is the point of it, and it is also the catch: another device knows none of it, and anything that clears this browser’s website data for this app takes all of it with it.

What is kept

Measured lens profiles — the result of a trip out with the camera and a run of Measure your lens. The most expensive thing here to lose.
Saved looks, including any you were sent, and imported LUTs.
The session you have open — the photos and each one’s edit — plus the settings and the colour palette.

What clears it

Clearing website data for this app, in the browser’s own settings.
Deleting the installed app from a home screen, which takes its storage with it.
A browser deciding it needs the room. On iPhone and iPad, Safari clears a site’s storage after about a week of not opening it — unless it is installed to the home screen, which is exempt. The app asks the browser to keep its storage after you measure a lens, and the lens panel prints the browser’s actual answer.
A private window, which keeps nothing past the session by design.

What survives all of it

A backup file. The lens panel saves every measured profile into one .json, and restores from it on any device. It tells you whether the copy you hold still matches what is on this device — a file saved before your last measurement is out of date, and it says so.
Exported photographs are ordinary files and are yours; removing the app does not touch them.
A look shared as a link, a file or a code is text you can keep or send on.

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.

The photo can't be drawn right now

The editor could not get ready on this device

This browser can't run the editor

This build

Practice library

Compare

Quick look

Develop unattended — what goes on every photo?

Custom aspect ratio

Name & share

Paste a look code

Untitled look

What's new

Roadmap

Settings

Day or night

Colour palette

Look every photo opens with

Measure your lens

Done — what would you like to do with it?

Manage your LUTs

Location is saved in this photo

How to use Infrared Photography Studio