Rian Johnson explains why he had to build his own iPhone camera app
A film look for phone photos
Johnson, who directed Knives Out and The Last Jedi, is devoted to analog photography and often uses a Leica M6 on set. Still, he wanted a more convenient way to give his iPhone pictures a look closer to the grading used in his films.
He said carrying camera equipment can be cumbersome, while his phone is always with him. His interest in phone photography goes back to a Nokia model whose grainy, high-contrast images he found appealing, despite its poor camera quality.
Editing became a chore
Modern smartphone photos often appear sharper and brighter than images from before computational photography became common, the report says. Johnson first tried editing iPhone pictures in Snapseed, then experimented with third-party RAW camera apps.
Moving files between apps and adjusting many controls grew tedious. Johnson said the process could leave him unsure how he had arrived at a particular result.
A shared color approach
Yedlin had developed color-grading scripts intended to give Johnson’s films an organic, celluloid-like look. Those tools later let Johnson apply the film color pipeline to RAW still images and scans.
Johnson asked Yedlin to adapt the approach for iPhone photography. The result, Chromagraph Camera, is a $13 iOS camera app that bypasses parts of Apple’s image-processing pipeline and applies the look used on Johnson’s movies.
Key points
- Chromagraph Camera is a $13 iOS app created by Rian Johnson and Steve Yedlin.
- The app applies the color treatment used on Johnson’s movies to iPhone images.
- Johnson sought an alternative to editing each phone photo by hand.
- Yedlin had developed color-grading tools to give Johnson’s films a celluloid-like appearance.