Rian Johnson is an analog photography devotee. The director of Knives Out and The Last Jedi can often be spotted on set with a Leica M6 at his side, documenting production on film. But sometimes, it’s still easier to reach for a phone. So Johnson started wondering if the photos from his iPhone could be made to look more like the grade he applies to his movies.
The result is Chromagraph Camera, a $13 iOS app that bypasses elements of Apple’s image processing pipeline and applies the same look used on Johnson’s movies. The app, made by Johnson and his longtime cinematographer, Steve Yedlin, is shockingly simple, with just a few primary settings, but it gives anyone who buys it access to image processing decisions good enough for a Hollywood production.
“The reality is, as much as I love my Leica, as much as I love my other gear, it’s a pain in the butt having a camera on your shoulder, or a massive backpack with four cameras in it,” Johnson says. “And I always have my phone with me.”
Johnson has been tinkering with phone photography for a long time. Back before the smartphone days, he bought a Nokia phone with a proper camera — at least, proper for the time. “It was like the first one where they advertised the camera on it as the main feature of it,” he says. “And it was garbage, the camera was awful, but it took these photos that were grainy and contrasty and funky and beautiful.”
Smartphone photography has progressed substantially since then, but that progression has also come with a loss of character. The default photos coming out of modern phones tend to look sharper, brighter, and more clinical than in the days before computational photography took hold. You can work around this, but it generally means shooting RAW and editing the images yourself.
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Initially, Johnson tried shooting with the iPhone’s default camera and editing in Snapseed to get his desired look. He then graduated to third-party RAW camera apps, only to get bogged down shuffling files back and forth and tweaking endless sliders. “I would do a lot of messing with every photo,” he says, “and then it was a little like I’d wandered through the woods and I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there.”
Smartphone makers have started including tools to add more character to their images. Apple added a texture panel with film, grain, and halation settings to the iPhone 18 Pro, and Google put a new “Camera Looks” panel in the Pixel 11. But these still don’t afford the level of control you get from starting with a RAW image. And if you really want to dial in a look that feels unique to you, that’s what you need to start with.
Yedlin is convinced that given the right set of algorithms and settings, there is no perceivable difference between an image shot on film and one shot on digital. A few years back, he set out to make a series of color grading scripts to give Johnson’s movies the organic look of celluloid. Eventually, those tools allowed Johnson to apply their movie color pipeline to his still RAW files and film scans. That gave Johnson the confidence to bring the same ideas to mobile.
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“I knew he could do it,” Johnson says. “I called Steve up and bullied him … I kept saying, ‘Can we do it for iPhone photos?’”
Chromagraph Camera is a camera, of course, with settings for maximum exposure time, burst mode, and color tuning, but maybe one of the most fun things to do is to import RAW images you’ve already shot and process them in the app. It’s a camera and editor in one, but I’ve found myself importing old RAWs and seeing what Yedlin’s film-like processing does to my existing library. It doesn’t work for every photo right out of the gate, but after import you’ll have tons of options for tuning, like tone, color, saturation, and texture.
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Johnson’s app is clearly still in its early stages, with settings and UI elements laid out in sometimes unexpected places. But the core of the app, the processing, is what is drawing people toward it. Over the weekend, Chromagraph went viral on social media, with many early users marveling at the app’s results compared to Apple’s defaults.
Even though this app gives Johnson what he’s been craving with smartphone photography, he remains entranced by much earlier photographic techniques. While chatting with me over coffee, I saw his eyes light up when he started talking about the 8 x 10 wet plate photography he’s been experimenting with at home. He even recently set up his own darkroom and continues to experiment with the chaotic, exciting art of analog photography.
“It’s like nerd fishing,” he says. “It’s about the actual process of doing it for me.”
Photography by David Imel / The Verge