Chromagraph Camera: Rian Johnson's iPhone App Tops the App Store
Director Rian Johnson had his cinematographer Steve Yedlin build an iPhone camera app. Chromagraph Camera costs €14.99 and quickly reached No. 1 among paid photo apps in France.
Chromagraph Camera, an iPhone photo app built by cinematographer Steve Yedlin at the request of director Rian Johnson, has climbed to the top of the paid Photo & Video charts on the French App Store within days of launch. It costs €14.99 with no subscription.
Johnson announced the app on X on 28 October 2026, writing that he had "badgered" Yedlin into making his ideal iPhone still camera app. The post drew more than 11 million views. Yedlin, who has shot all of Johnson's films since Brick in 2005, from Looper to Wake Up Dead Man, developed it with Eric Cameron, a developer specialising in color science.
RAW capture, film-style processing
The app shoots in RAW and bypasses Apple's image processing entirely, replacing it with the color pipeline Yedlin uses on Johnson's movies, tuned to the behavior of Apple's sensors. The makers stress the difference from a filter: a filter sits on top of an image the phone has already processed, whereas Chromagraph starts from raw sensor data.
Another choice borrowed from analog photography: you frame and shoot, and only see the final look when you open the gallery. Afterwards you can adjust color, exposure, grain and halation, the soft glow around highlights typical of film stock, without touching the original RAW file, which stays inside the app. Photos export as JPEG or HEIC to the photo library, optionally automatically.
Limits and competition
Johnson listed the limits himself. There is no video for now; the team is considering it, but it would likely only work on the latest iPhone Pro models. There is no Android version either: he says Apple's uniform hardware lets a very small team calibrate the look with confidence, which Android's diversity of devices prevents.
The look is a deliberate choice, and people who like straight-out-of-camera iPhone shots may find it a little dark. Bypassing Apple's processing is not new either: Halide, a reference app for photography purists, already offers a similar mode. Chromagraph's pitch is its signature look, built on Yedlin's long-held argument that a film's look owes more to image processing than to the camera that captured it.
