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You should never take a photo of your midterm election ballot—it’s illegal in some states—but, thanks to Rian Johnson and his longtime DP Steve Yedlin, there’s now a very cinematic way to take iPhone photos of everything else.
Yedlin has spent more than 20 years as a cinematographer, collaborating closely with Johnson on everything from “Brick” and “The Brothers Bloom” to “The Last Jedi” and the “Knives Out” films. But Yedlin has also spent 20 years studying the science of color and how filmmakers can make images better through the technical tools available. And now he and his friends are involved in making new ones.
Yedlin, Johnson, and color science coder Eric Cameron have been creating new software for lighting controls to replace traditional lighting boards, pixel mapping, and on-screen playback (ie, when actors look at phone or computer screens on camera) with something that embraces the world of color-tunable lighting and LEDs. But as a side project, they’ve also just launched Chromagraph, an iPhone app that uses Yedlin’s deep, mathematical understanding of color to bypass the iPhone’s standard photo-processing options for a more cinematic look.
The app project began because Johnson wanted something on his phone that could capture photos the way Yedlin captures film – using RAW images (ie, everything the sensor captures, not just what’s rendered on screen) and bypassing standard iPhone image processing protocols.
Amazingly, it only took ten weeks to build, test and develop the app, Johnson wanted a place the team was happy with – although Yedlin admitted to IndieWire that the process of creating Chromagraph was still very intensive. The cinematographer had done the math to build an image processing scene that works for cinema cameras like the Arri ALEXA, but even the latest pro-level iPhone cameras have sensors that are so small. bad luckand they also transmit image information in a different way to how film cameras work.
“The code values themselves, like the actual numbers in the pixels, alone don’t tell you how clear something is supposed to be. The code values are in the pixels and this [metadata] assessment,” Yedlin said of iPhone cameras, before worrying that it was far too technical for a 900-word article. It’s completely different math for most.”
To make a long story short, then, Yedlin and Cameron couldn’t reprogram the iPhone’s camera, but they were able to access conduct in a different way to import RAW images (everything captured by the camera sensor) into Chromagraph and then do a bunch of different and complex math to achieve image processing for the cinematic look that Rian Johnson wanted to be able to pull up at the swipe of a screen.
The main thing that was important to the team was to get it right and to show real color science, as opposed to “bullshit cinema color science,” according to Yedlin, to work from the fact that images that look aesthetically pleasing are not clinical or technical reactions. They are not photometrically or colorimetrically “correct.”
“What makes a good image is something that looks enough like what it represents to be recognizable and then to be beautiful,” Yedlin said. “Even when you have a very clinical look, like a broadcast look compared to a cinema look, it’s also not photometrically or colorimetrically correct. different way, you know? It’s always a matter of taste.”
A lot of the very complicated math that went into how Chromagraph processes images is based on Yedlin and Johnson’s taste for how to make an image look artistic, but then the app has different tools and saturation for individual photographers to look at their work even further. The tools inside Chromagraph are, of course, meant to be just like white balance math in ISO on a film camera.
“It becomes again like giving pictures a ‘Knives Out’ look, and that’s fine if people want to say that, but I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as an artistic contribution in general. “This is just image processing, so it’s one look for that part, but the image processing part is not the only thing that makes a picture.”
Where Chromagraph can really help photographers make their own photos, however, is in capturing color in a way that the iPhone’s default mode can’t quite reach. “Vibrant colors is where I think Chromagraph really shines. A lot of times, with garish colors, you can have that saturation look where one of the three channels is distorted so that the whole area looks like it’s just been colored in like a coloring book,” Yedlin said. “So some people are posting pictures [from the app] where the colors really stand out, but then someone else posts pictures with more subtle, sophisticated colors. It’s just one look, but it’s for that last little something for whatever kind of picture you take.”
For that reason, Yedlin, Johnson, and Cameron do not necessarily want to support multiple appearances within Chromagraph. They also don’t plan on building an Android version anytime soon, and while they do want to support video, that’s still far from being worked out. But for photographers with an iPhone in their pocket, the app is a fun, easy shortcut to importing photos into professional post tools.
“We’re happy that every picture looks the way we want it,” Yedlin said.
Chromagraph is now available in the Apple App Store.
