Last week saw an unexpected hit on the iPhone App Store: a $12.99 camera app without a free trial or a subscription. Chromagraph Camera shot to the top of the paid Photo & Video charts after Knives Out and Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson revealed that he had assigned his longtime cinematographer, Steve Yedlin, to work on his dream photo app for the iPhone.
Johnson, who partnered with Yedlin on every feature film throughout his career—from 2005’s Brick to last year’s latest Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man—suggested that this was a project he’d wanted to exist for a while.
“So I recently badgered my cinematographer @steveyedlin into making my ideal iPhone still camera app,” Johnson wrote on X. “It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone’s look processing and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies.”
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Growing discontent
The pitch speaks to a growing discontent with the way the default camera app on the iPhone handles image processing. Apple’s computational photography pipeline is incredibly good at making sure you don’t miss the moment, and at rescuing challenging exposures, blending several frames together at once so you don’t blow out highlights or lose details in the shadows. But flattening the actual world like that comes at the expense of traditional photographic character, leaving images feeling artificially sharpened and reliant on HDR.
Yedlin is uniquely qualified to rethink how a smartphone camera might turn light into a final photo. In filmmaking circles, he is well-known for his research into color science. His Display Prep Demo in 2015 was influential in showing how a particular filmic look isn’t unique to actual celluloid or a certain camera brand, but something that can be replicated by transforming raw digital sensor data. Yedlin argued that creators should be the authors of their own looks, sculpting elements of the image like grain, tonal rolloff and halation, or the glow that surrounds bright light sources on film.
Chromagraph showcases that philosophy on a smaller scale. Combined with work from color science programmer Eric Cameron, it takes the iPhone’s raw sensor data and tweaks it to Yedlin’s specific taste. You don’t see the effect while framing your shot in the viewfinder; the effect is applied after you capture the image.
But because Chromagraph stores the original raw files, you can later tweak parameters like tone, grain, and halation after the fact without losing image quality, then export the JPEG to your camera roll. That’s a world away from traditional photo filters. Even Apple’s ProRAW format still retains elements of the iPhone’s multiframe merging.
The look won’t be for everyone. Next to a full-resolution ProRAW shot, you’re inevitably going to get a softer, grainier image that will often blow out the highlights. The app’s user interface could also use some work, as it doesn’t feel fully native to iOS.
But in my testing, I’ve been struck by how cohesive Chromagraph feels across a variety of situations. It’s like the app turns the iPhone into a singular 35mm point-and-shoot camera with a well-chosen film stock. I’ve rarely been disappointed with the results.
“The custom look is opinionated,” Yedlin told Newsshooter. “It’s just the nuanced and idiosyncratic rendering of tonality and chromaticity (as well as grain and halation) that Rian, Eric, and I personally like. And the grading knobs allow you to make pretty dramatic adjustments while keeping within that overall core look.”
Not the first try
Chromagraph isn’t the first attempt to bring a more traditionally photographic style to smartphone imagery. For years now, Chinese phone makers Oppo and Xiaomi—in partnership with pro camera titans Hasselblad and Leica, respectively—have deployed tasteful image processing pipelines right in their default camera apps. The standard Leica Authentic mode on Xiaomi phones is particularly good; this year’s Xiaomi 17 Ultra even included an option to directly emulate the CCD sensor of the classic Leica M9.
On the iPhone side, other apps have offered their own take on stripped-down raw image capture, like the Process Zero mode in Halide. It’s also fair to say that Apple itself is starting to notice the demand; the iPhone 18 Pro comes with an updated take on the Photographic Styles feature that includes a customizable film setting that adds halation and grain. It takes a little tweaking to get right, but it is now possible to set up an iPhone to take good-looking filmic photos right in the regular camera app.
What I think speaks to people about Chromagraph, though, is that it looks even better without requiring any setup at all. It’s just one creative vision that you can take or leave. Judging by the reactions I’ve seen from countless people with whom it’s clearly resonated, you may well want to take that vision for yourself—even if it does come in the rare form of an app you have to pay for outright in 2026.
“I’ve messed with plenty of good 3rd party tools but this is an elegant one-stop-shop,” Johnson said on X. “It just takes beautiful shots with Steve’s special sauce processing.”
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