Knives Out Director Launches a $13 iPhone Camera App With His Cinematographer
Rian Johnson, director of the Knives Out films, has launched an iPhone app that gives ordinary users the colour processing used on his movies. The app, Chromagraph Camera, costs $13 on the Apple App Store, Forbes reported on 29 October.
Johnson built the app with cinematographer Steve Yedlin and Eric Cameron. Yedlin writes the image processing used on Johnson's films, and the two have worked together for nearly 30 years. Their latest project together was Wake Up Dead Man, the third film in the Knives Out series, made for Netflix.
The app shoots in RAW, a format that keeps the raw data from the phone's sensor instead of a finished, pre-styled picture. It skips the iPhone's default look altogether. Deadline reported that the app uses the same image processing as Johnson's films, including Brick (2005), Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017) and the Knives Out franchise.
Once a photo is taken, users can adjust colour, exposure, grain and halation, the soft glow that appears around bright light. The finished image can then be saved to the camera roll. Apple's own listing describes the app as replacing the phone's default processing with curated colour and texture rendering designed by Yedlin.
There are limits. Chromagraph Camera takes only photos at the moment and has no video mode. Yedlin has said it is not meant to replace Apple's Camera app, which remains the everyday tool for most people.
The launch has also been a hit with shoppers. Forbes reported that the app surged to the top of the App Store charts after release. Deadline reported this week that Johnson had announced the launch.
For anyone who has wondered why movie images look so different from their own phone snapshots, this is a hands-on way to test the difference. The app puts the same choices filmmakers make about colour and grain into a few sliders on a phone.
