Despite costing $12.99, Rian Johnson’s iPhone camera app is #1 in the App Store

Earlier this week, director Rian Johnson – best known for Knives Out and, err, worst known for The Last Jedi – announced a bespoke camera app for iPhones, and it has been quite successful, despite demanding an upfront payment.

Called “Chromagraph Camera”, the app is only available on the App Store for iPhone, and it will stay this way due to the unique nature of the software.

“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. I’ve messed with plenty of good 3rd 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,” Johnson explains on Twitter/X.

“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! A few caveats: it’s stills only, it doesn’t do video, we may pursue it in the future but it likely would only be possible on the last few generations of pro model iPhones.”

The director ends the explanation of his app by offering “huge apologies” to Android users as the app will remain on iPhone. Johnson points to the uniform nature of the Apple ecosystem compared to the wildly different world of Android devices, which is fair for an app that works so closely with hardware.

At the time of writing, Chromagraph Camera is in first place on the App Store in the “Photo & Video” category. It has a 4.8 rating (out of 5) from 29 reviews and it is a rather small app with an indicated size of just 29.7 megabytes.

While most people have gotten use to free apps, this is a premium one, costing $12.99 in its native America. There is, however, localised pricing. Visiting the app’s store page here, when using an Apple device logged into a South Africa account, will reveal a price of R99.99.

An image captured in the app shared by Johnson.

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