Shooting beautiful photos with an iPhone isn’t always the simplest task. Though the cameras are serviceable for a phone, Apple’s complex, built-in processing usually spits out vibrant but flatly lit images. Enter Knives Out and Star Wars director Rian Johnson and his longtime cinematographer Steve Yedlin.
With the help of programmer Eric Johnson, the filmmakers recently introduced Chromagraph, a new camera app for iOS built on the same color science Yedlin developed over many years for their movies. Open up the app, and you’re met with a relatively simple interface—in some ways, even simpler than Apple’s stock camera app—that serves an even simpler purpose: taking great pictures. Snap a photo, and the app captures an image in RAW format, containing the unprocessed data directly from the camera’s sensor.
Then it applies Yedlin’s color science, creating a very “filmic” look with more contrast, grain, halation, and an overall color curve resembling classic film stocks. The user can then adjust the look of their pictures any which way they want using the provided sliders. Chromagraph is hardly the first replacement camera app for the iPhone—and yes, it’s iPhone-only for now.
Apps like Halide and Adobe’s Project Indigo offer a lot more options and might be more fit for professional use. But to Johnson and Yedlin, Chromagraph is built to reflect the more point-and-shoot quality of a smartphone camera, keeping its UI simple and its feature set relatively small, giving the average user an easy new tool for taking beautiful photos with the device they carry around every day. A week after it went live, Johnson and Yedlin sat down to talk about what inspired them to build Chromagraph, reverse-engineering Apple’s own processing techniques, the often misguided debate between film and digital, and the magic of taking a beautiful picture.
GQ: So Rian, how did you bully Steve into making this app? Rian Johnson: With love. [Laughs]. I take a lot of pictures with my phone.
I'm an amateur photographer, and I have a film camera that I use. I have a few other cameras, but the reality is, this is what I walk around with all day long. I had gone through different versions of taking regular pictures and pulling them into photo editors and trying to get them to look the way I wanted them.
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