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.
Chromagraph Camera looks good and works well
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.
My favorite Apple accessory recommendations:
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