Film director Rian Johnson , known for Knives Out, Glass Onion and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, has released an iPhone camera app that gives photos the same look as his movies. It’s called Chromagraph Camera. It shoots in RAW and bypasses the iPhone’s built-in image processing, using the colour science his cinematographer Steve Yedlin developed for their films instead.
Johnson says he “badgered” Yedlin, who has shot all his films since Brick in 2005, into making his ideal iPhone camera. Yedlin built it with colour science programmer Eric Cameron. Johnson takes a lot of photos on his phone and simply wanted the app for himself, but Yedlin and Cameron decided to make it available to everyone. Chromagraph works a bit like a film camera. You frame and take the shot through the viewfinder, and the processed look only shows up when you open the gallery. Compared to the iPhone’s default camera, photos come out darker and warmer, with grain and less digital sharpening. They also get halation, the soft glow that appears around bright lights on film. There are controls for colour, exposure, grain and halation, though they stay within Chromagraph’s signature look.