Last week, movie director Rian Johnson announced a surprise new camera app for iPhone that reimagines what a smartphone photo should look like. Many people would agree that Apple’s iPhone photos are a tad bit overprocessed.
iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo introduced a new film texture option, but in my view, it’s a bit too exaggerated. Chromagraph Camera, on the other hand, feels pretty perfect.
Attempts have been made to improve iPhone photos for years, but they all feel a little bit too heavy, in my view. Most camera apps for iPhone require you to dial settings in. While that can be appropriate for certain settings, I ultimately want my iPhone to just be a point and shoot experience. If I wanted the perfect photo, I’d be using my camera.
That said, iPhone photos just don’t look super excellent out of the box. It’s not a limitation of hardware. If you take a RAW iPhone photo and edit it yourself, you can actually get surprisingly good results. Apple’s camera app just has poor defaults.
When Apple introduced the film grain feature on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo, I was actually quite interested in it. It was certainly my favorite camera feature of the phone when I briefly tried out the iPhone 18 Pro. For some reason though, the film look just feels a bit exaggerated on iPhone Duo.
Apps like Adobe’s Project Indigo have gotten really close in terms of look, but the fact that there’s so much time spent post-processing means it’s often inconvenient. I’ve also had a few instances of losing photos because the app closed in the background while it was still processing the photo.
When Chromagraph Camera was announced, I was quite interested. I paid the $12.99, and I’ve been happy with the results. I tweeted some of my sample photos when I just got the app, and it’s been well worth it.
$12.99 may be a higher starting price, but if you really want an iPhone camera app that just takes good looking photos without a lot of hassle, it works really well.
awesome app. well worth the $13 https://t.co/1gcl4o8MQA pic.twitter.com/mMKJJzT5Pv
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Michael is a 9to5Mac Reporter, leading all of our Apple news coverage on weekends and reviewing the newest Apple products and accessories. He got started in the world of Apple news during the pandemic, and it became a growing hobby. He’s also an indie iOS developer, and started the weekly Indie App Spotlight series, which has covered hundreds of blooming new apps since it launched. In his free time, he enjoys shooting street photography around New York City on his Sony A7RV.
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