After nearly 30 years of collaboration behind the camera, Rian Johnson has enlisted his cinematographer Steve Yedlin to package their aesthetic in a new iPhone app.
Thee 2x Oscar-nominated writer and director announced the launch of Chromagraph Camera this week, which he explained “uses the same image processing we use” on their movies like Brick (2005), Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) and the Knives Out franchise.
“So I recently badgered my cinematographer @steveyedlin into making my ideal iPhone still camera app,” he wrote on X. “It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone’s look processing and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies.”
Johnson added, “I’ve messed with plenty of good third party tools but this is an elegant one-stop-shop, it just takes beautiful shots with Steve’s special sauce processing. You can fine tune the image in the app (with color, exposure, grain and halation tools) and export it to your camera roll.”
Noting that he writes “all of my own image processing that we use on the movies,” Yedlin told Wired that he doesn’t intend for the app to replace Apple’s Camera app. “It’s just this curated app that takes the pictures the way we like,” he explained.
Meanwhile, the app is only able to take photos at the moment, with no video capabilities yet, Yedlin notes that there are still limitations that come with the device.
“This idea that you can actually have the control that a professional camera would have is not really true anyhow,” added Yedlin.
Yedlin’s most recent collaboration with Johnson came with last year’s Wake Up Dead Man, the third installment in his Knives Out trilogy at Netflix.
