Last week, filmmaker Rian Johnson announced a stunning new iPhone camera app that reinvents what a smartphone photo should look like. Many people would agree that Apple iPhone photos are a bit overprocessed.
The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo introduced a new screen texture option, but it’s a little too over the top in my opinion. Chromagraph Camera, on the other hand, looks pretty perfect.
Attempts have been made to improve iPhone photos for years, but in my opinion they all seem a little too heavy. Most iPhone camera apps require dialing in settings. While this may be appropriate for certain settings, ultimately I want my iPhone to be just a point-and-shoot experience. If I wanted the perfect photo, I would use my camera.
That said, iPhone photos don’t exactly look great out of the box. This is not a hardware limitation. If you take a RAW photo of the iPhone and edit it yourself, you can actually get surprisingly good results. Apple’s camera app just has poor default settings.
When Apple introduced the film grain feature on the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo, I was actually quite interested in it. It was definitely my favorite phone camera feature when I briefly tried out the iPhone 18 Pro. For some reason, though, the cinematic look seems a little overdone on the iPhone Duo.
Apps like Adobe’s Project Indigo have come very close in terms of appearance, but the fact that there’s so much time spent on post-processing means it’s often awkward. I’ve also had a few cases of photo loss because the app would close in the background while it was still processing the photo.
The Chromagraph Camera looks great and works well
When Chromagraph Camera was announced, I was quite interested. I paid $12.99 and was happy with the results. I tweeted some of my sample photos when I just got the app and it was worth it.
$12.99 might be a higher starting price, but if you really want an iPhone camera app that takes good-looking photos without too much hassle, it works really well.
My favorite Apple accessory recommendations:
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