Why Rian Johnson made a photo app

What It Covers

Director Rian Johnson and Vergecast host David Pierce discuss smartphone photography, film versus digital cinematography, and the creation of Chromograph Camera — a mobile app built with cinematographer Steve Yedlin that applies their professional film-look processing pipeline to iPhone raw photos, bypassing Apple's default image rendering entirely.

Key Questions Answered

• •Raw photo workflow: Shooting raw on iPhone via third-party apps like Halide, then editing in Lightroom Mobile or Darkroom rather than Snapseed, unlocks significantly more image control. Snapseed uses non-standard terminology (brightness instead of highlights) that obscures its editing ceiling. Switching to professional-grade editing vocabulary and tools removes the ceiling most casual smartphone photographers hit when processing raw files.
• •Chromograph Camera app: Johnson and Yedlin built a camera app that captures raw iPhone photos and applies the same custom LUT and image processing pipeline used across all of Johnson's films, including the Knives Out trilogy. The app also performs its own burst-merge HDR processing, making it available on non-Pro iPhone models that lack Apple's native multi-frame exposure merging capability.
• •Digital vs. film look: The defining elements of a film look in digital are the tone curve (where blacks cut off, where highlights clip, and the curve between them), halation (the red glow around high-contrast highlights caused by light bouncing off film's red backing layer), and grain. Yedlin's position: it is easier to make digital look like film than to make film consistently look like film across a production.
• •Apple camera design: Building Chromograph from scratch revealed how sophisticated Apple's native camera app design is. Features like multi-lens handling, zoom behavior, and HDR bracketing that feel intuitive as a user represent deep, non-obvious engineering decisions. Johnson's team repeatedly attempted alternative approaches and returned to Apple's solutions, recognizing them as genuinely optimal rather than arbitrary defaults.
• •Film in VFX productions: Any shot in a major film production containing visual effects gets digitized, degrained, processed digitally, and then has synthetic grain reapplied before output. This makes shooting film for effects-heavy sequences largely redundant. The Last Jedi shifted from 40% film to predominantly digital mid-production partly due to film camera reliability issues and inconsistent film stock behavior under production conditions.
• •HDR display pipeline problem: Johnson describes consumer HDR television as the equivalent of motion smoothing applied to color — it overrides a filmmaker's carefully graded image by cranking highlights and altering contrast without consent. The entire post-production color pipeline, including scanner choice when digitizing film, defines a film's look, making display-level HDR processing a direct corruption of the intended artistic output.