Rian Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin have launched Chromagraph, an iPhone camera app designed to give photos a more cinematic look. The project also involved color science coder Eric Cameron and grew out of Johnson’s wish to capture images using RAW data while avoiding the iPhone’s standard photo processing.
Yedlin, who has worked with Johnson on films including “Brick,” “The Last Jedi” and the “Knives Out” movies, drew on more than two decades of experience in cinematography and color science. He told IndieWire that adapting his image-processing approach for an iPhone required a different kind of math from the work he had developed for cinema cameras. The team could not reprogram the iPhone camera, but designed Chromagraph to work with the RAW image data it captured.
The app’s look reflects Yedlin and Johnson’s aesthetic preferences rather than an attempt to reproduce color in a strictly technical sense. Chromagraph includes controls for contrast and saturation, giving photographers room to adjust images. Yedlin said its processing can be particularly effective with vibrant colors, while also supporting more subtle, nuanced results.
Yedlin cautioned against treating Chromagraph as a preset that recreates the “Knives Out” look. In his view, image processing is only one part of a photograph’s appearance; lighting, subject matter and the photographer’s choices also shape the result.
The team built and refined the app over about ten weeks. Chromagraph is available in Apple’s App Store. Its creators are not planning an Android version soon, and video support remains a longer-term possibility.
Sources: IndieWire.