‘The Last Jedi’ Director Launches a New Camera App for iPhone (Because He’s a Good Guy)

Rian Johnson, the director behind Knives Out and The Last Jedi, apparently felt like Apple’s iPhone camera app wasn’t good enough. So he made his own. Johnson announced the new app Wednesday in a post on X. “So I recently badgered my cinematographer [Steve Yedlin] into making my ideal iPhone still camera app. It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone’s look processing and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies,” Johnson wrote in the post. The app, called Chromagraph Camera, was developed with Johnson’s longtime cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who has worked on every one of his feature films, starting with Brick in 2005. Their “genius color science coder friend” Eric Cameron also worked on it. I honestly just asked Steve (and our genius color science coder friend Eric Cameron) to make it because I take a ton of pics with my phone and wanted to have it for myself, and they figured hey, let's put it out there. Hope you enjoy! pic.twitter.com/PrfNhkgaB7 — Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) October 28, 2026 Johnson said he has experimented with plenty of good third-party camera tools over the years, but described the new app as an “elegant one-stop shop.” Unlike other camera apps, Chromagraph starts with raw image data and bypasses the iPhone’s standard image processing. Instead, it uses the custom image processing Yedlin developed for his films. “It’s an easy to use camera with a curated, artful look. It’s not a ‘filter’ on top of the iPhone processing, but instead completely bypasses the iPhone look management and replaces it with the same custom math I use on all my films, tailored to Apple camera behavior,” Yedlin wrote in an Instagram post. Yedlin described the result as “the nuanced and idiosyncratic rendering of tonality and chromaticity (as well as grain and halation) that Rian, Eric, and I personally like.” In addition to that signature look, the app lets users fine-tune their photos by adjusting color, tone, and texture. For now, the Chromagraph Camera app only takes still photos. Johnson said video support could come in the future, though it would likely be limited to newer iPhone models. It currently ranks second on the App Store’s Photo & Video chart and costs $12.99. However, there’s some bad news for Android users. The app will likely remain exclusive to Apple devices. “Hardware consistency across Apple devices is part of what allows us to do this with confidence. Android devices are much more varied, and there’s no way with our small team we could dial it in for every device,” Johnson wrote on X. The app comes more than six years after Johnson revealed an unusual Apple policy. According to the director, the company allows its phones to appear in movies, but never in the hands of villains. “Apple, they let you use iPhones in movies but, and this is very pivotal if you’re ever watching a mystery movie—bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera,” he said in a 2020 video for Vanity Fair. “Every single filmmaker who has a bad guy in their movie that’s supposed to be a secret wants to murder me right now.”