We checked out Chromagraph, Rian Johnson’s viral iPhone camera app

Recently, a corner of the web began going abuzz at the sight of a brand-new app. The app in concern was Chromagrapha photography app for the iPhone, and one with some major qualifications to back it up.

The app was very first given individuals’s attention by among the co-creators himself. A lot of you would recognize with Rian Johnson, however for those who aren’t, Johnson is the writer/director behind movies such as Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Looper, and most just recently, the Knives Out trilogy. Johnson tweeted about how he desired an excellent iPhone photography app that would bypass the iPhone’s default image processing and appearance and rather capture something that would appear like the films he’s dealt with.

So I just recently pestered my cinematographer @steveyedlin into making my perfect iPhone still electronic camera app. It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone’s appearance processing and rather utilizes the exact same image processing we utilize on our films. https://t.co/makZzhFd2Q– Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) October 28, 2026

Johnson made this demand to his pal, associate, and cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who has actually dealt with him on all of his movies, and the 2 trapped their good friend Eric Cameron to make the app. And hence, Chromagraph was born.

Chromagraph is not your common iPhone cam app that records the image utilizing the phone’s imaging pipeline and after that possibly layers on a filter to get the preferred appearance. The app catches raw image information and after that processes it utilizing its own pipeline and the color science that Johnson and Yedlin have actually utilized on their movies. You can tune the output to your taste a bit, however the total appearance is one that has actually been pre-decided for you, and one that the developers preferred.

Still from Rian Johnson’s most current movie, ‘Wake Up Dead Man’

Evaluating the app on the iPhone 18 Pro, I saw that the UI is relatively standard with a black and gold color style. The majority of the alternatives on the screen would recognize to anybody who has actually utilized phone cam apps before; this isn’t, after all, among those “professional” cam apps that provide you a billion choices. It’s suggested to do actually simply something, and all readily available choices remain in service of that.

Through the settings, you can alter things like how the images are conserved, the element ratio, the default lens, export format, and compression quality. You can likewise tune the default appearance of the images, however more on that later on.

Chromagraph UI and settings

The images that the app captures are mostly conserved within the app as RAW files. You can have the app likewise instantly conserve a JPEG variation, however I discovered it much better to conserve just the images I desire by hand. When you open a recorded image, you have the choice to make standard modifications, consisting of direct exposure, contrast, shadows and highlights, white balance, saturation, movie grain, halation, and crop. You can likewise set a crop element as your default while shooting, and the viewfinder modifications to show that. Obviously, considering that it’s RAW, the crop isn’t conserved, and you can constantly go back to the complete sensing unit crop.

The settings that Chromagraph deals are more like dressings and not truly meant to entirely alter the appearance of the image. If you’ve seen Johnson and Yedlin movies, they all have this lavish, warm shade to them with abundant colors and soft halation throughout the highlights. They’re not shot on movie, however they are suggested to stimulate that appearance. This is what the Chromagraph attempts to recreate with the iPhone hardware.

Chromagraph samples (shot on the iPhone 18 Pro)

All images shot from this app by default have those exact same warm shades with a beautiful golden undertone. There is no rubbish here about maintaining highlights or exploding shadows to win some fictional web points. There is a soft flower around high-contrast edges. The information are what the sensing unit and the lens capture without synthetic honing. There is sound, some natural, the rest tastefully included by the app. It deals with feelings with intentional flaws instead of chasing after technical excellence.

The outcomes can be sensational, if situational. Chromagraph definitely shines on bright days and high-contrast scenes. Offer it some natural light, and the app will produce print-worthy stills. The default tuning isn’t really flexible, so it either works truly well or does not operate at all, depending upon the scene. Lot of times, if the lighting is still favorable to how the app works, you can still get terrific outcomes with a little bit of tuning later. You can likewise simply alter the default criteria a bit so the app constantly catches the images that method.

It is extremely simple to reach the limitations of the app. Under indoor synthetic lighting, specifically of the fluorescent kind, the arise from the default tuning can be rather odd and borderline undesirable. It’s up to you then to use your own perceptiveness and intentionally tune for cooler colors so the app’s default warm tones do not encounter the present lighting.

iPhone stock vs Chromagraph look

The default color tuning is downplayed and a bit undersaturated. This indicates you can’t get vibrant, punchy colors for things like food and clothes unless you truly tug the saturation slider in the settings. It’s most likely for the finest if you prevent shooting those, unless you choose things to look that method.[ 19659022]Image aside, the app itself can be a bit bothersome sometimes. Opening a caught image is a fast and simple procedure, however returning to the viewfinder needs fumbling with the small cam button at the top. The app likewise can not keep in mind which electronic camera you last utilized, and whenever you open the gallery it returns to the primary cam, or whichever one you set as the default in the settings. The viewfinder likewise took a while to load at times, even on the newest iPhone 18 Pro, and there were times it didn’t load at all.

Chromagraph’s anamorphic 2.39:1 element ratio

All of this makes Chromagraph incredibly situational. It feels cumbersome to utilize sometimes, and the outcomes do not constantly work for every topic. It was likewise the most enjoyable I had shooting with a phone in current times. Often, working within the rigorous constraints of a piece of hardware or software application is precisely what you require to get your innovative juices streaming and push yourself to do much better. I’ve likewise seen the app get routine updates given that Rian Johnson initially tweeted about it, so it’s possible a few of the concerns pointed out here might get repaired by the time you read this.

Is this the very best or just iPhone video camera app you should have? No, vice versa, really. There are some fantastic electronic camera apps out there for the iPhone that do the entire zero-processing thing, consisting of Halide and Mood, where you can bypass the phone’s aggressive default processing to get tidy RAWs that you can modify to your taste. Chromagraph is developed to accomplish a particular appearance, and if you jive with it, then it is definitely worth taking a look at.