Last week saw an unexpected hit on the iPhone App Store: a $12.99 camera app without a free trial or a subscription. Chromagraph Camera shot to the top of the paid Photo & Video charts after Knives Out and Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson revealed that he had assigned his longtime cinematographer, Steve Yedlin, to work on his dream photo app for the iPhone.

Johnson, who partnered with Yedlin on every feature film throughout his career—from 2005’s Brick to last year’s latest Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man—suggested that this was a project he’d wanted to exist for a while. 

“So I recently badgered my cinematographer @steveyedlin into making my ideal iPhone still camera app,” Johnson wrote on X. “It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone’s look processing and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies.”

The pitch speaks to a growing discontent with the way the default camera app on the iPhone handles image processing. Apple’s computational photography pipeline is incredibly good at making sure you don’t miss the moment, and at rescuing challenging exposures, blending several frames together at once so you don’t blow out highlights or lose details in the shadows. But flattening the actual world like that comes at the expense of traditional photographic character, leaving images feeling artificially sharpened and reliant on HDR.

Yedlin is uniquely qualified to rethink how a smartphone camera might turn light into a final photo. In filmmaking circles, he is well-known for his research into color science.

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