Nov 4, 2026 · 1h 6m
Rian Johnson turns cinematic color science into an iPhone camera
Why Rian Johnson made a photo app
The conversation examines whether smartphone photography can offer meaningful creative control without sacrificing the convenience that makes phones useful.
- 1Rian Johnson and Steve Yedlin adapted a cinematic image-processing workflow into Chromograph, a smartphone camera built around RAW capture and control.
- 2The film-versus-digital debate matters less than process, with imperfections, workflow, and image decisions shaping how technology feels creatively.
- 3Johnson argues that cameras should serve the story, even as new tools make experimentation and visual planning easier than ever.
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Johnson explains how a difficult smartphone sunset image revealed the potential of Yedlin’s processing and helped motivate Chromograph.
The brief
Rian Johnson joins David Imel to discuss Leica cameras, black-and-white film, smartphone photography, and the gap between capturing an image and controlling it.
Johnson’s collaboration with cinematographer Steve Yedlin moved from feature-film image science to Chromograph, an iPhone app that captures RAW images and applies a film-inspired pipeline.
The app responds to a familiar smartphone tradeoff: automatic processing produces broadly usable pictures, but can obscure the choices photographers want to make themselves.
A tour of unusual cameras, lenses, glass plates, and large-format equipment broadens the discussion into a camera renaissance built from both old ideas and new tools.
Johnson ultimately puts story before gear, arguing that visual experiments matter only when they serve the script rather than turning equipment into the subject.
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