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A sample photo from the Chromagraph Camera App Store listing, a pier at sunset rendered with Steve Yedlin's color and grain.
Image: Chromatic Applications

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Rian Johnson's Cinematographer Built an iPhone Camera App That Shoots Like the Knives Out Movies, and It Became the App Store's Top Paid Download

Chromagraph Camera skips Apple's own photo processing and runs Steve Yedlin's film color pipeline on raw sensor data instead. It costs $12.99, shoots stills only, and climbed the paid chart after Johnson posted about it.

Los Angeles · Maya Chen, Gadgets · Nov 2 2026

LOS ANGELES - The director Rian Johnson wanted an iPhone camera that made his snapshots look like his movies, so he asked the man who shoots them to build one. The result, Chromagraph Camera, is now on sale in Apple’s App Store for $12.99, and after Johnson posted about it on Wednesday, Oct. 28, it quickly became the top paid download in the store, Wired reported on Sunday.

“So I recently badgered my cinematographer @steveyedlin into making my ideal iPhone still camera app,” Johnson wrote in his post on X, which had drawn more than 55,000 likes by Monday. “It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone’s look processing and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies.”

Screenshot: @rianjohnson on X, Oct. 28, 2026 Screenshot: @rianjohnson on X

Steve Yedlin has shot Johnson’s films, including Knives Out and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and he writes the color software used on them himself. “I write all of my own image processing that we use on the movies,” he told Wired. He built the app with Johnson and the programmer Eric Cameron, and the three tested it for a couple of months before releasing it.

The pitch is that Chromagraph is not a filter. According to its App Store listing, the app starts from raw image data and builds the picture its own way, instead of laying a look over the processing the iPhone has already done. It works more like a film camera than Apple’s Camera app: the viewfinder shows an ordinary preview, and the finished look appears only after the shot is processed and opened in the app’s gallery.

The iPad version of Chromagraph’s camera and editor, from the App Store listing. Image: Chromatic Applications

Owners can then adjust color, tone and texture, including grain and halation, the soft glow that film adds around bright highlights, without losing the core look. The gallery keeps full-quality raw originals and applies the look live, and photos can be exported to the photo library as JPEG or HEIC files, either one at a time or automatically. The app shoots stills only. There is no video mode.

Yedlin is clear about what the app is not. “It’s just this curated app that takes the pictures the way we like,” he told Wired, adding that it is not meant to replace Apple’s camera or to be a full professional editing tool. He also cautioned that software can only do so much with a phone. “This idea that you can actually have the control that a professional camera would have is not really true anyhow,” he said.

Chromagraph’s iPhone camera, gallery and editor screens. Image: Chromatic Applications

The app is sold by Chromatic Applications LLC as a one-time purchase with no in-app purchases, and it requires iOS 17 or later. 9to5Mac reported that it already supports the iPhone Duo and was the top paid app in the Photo & Video category. The developers are already patching it: version 1.2.1, released on Sunday, fixes an editor screen that shifted to the right after changes on some phones.