Cassini Camera vs CHRO

Cassini Camera is a palette-quantised photography instrument for iPhone. It takes the 12-colour palette system from the Cassini ECS-1 drawing suite and applies it to a live camera feed. A Metal GPU shader reduces every frame to the nearest colours in your chosen palette at 30 frames per second. What you see in the viewfinder is what you get. INSTRUMENT SPECIFICATIONS - 12-colour palette quantisation via Metal compute shader - 500 x 1000 live viewfinder at 30 FPS - 2000 x 4000 output resolution (4x nearest-neighbour upscale) - 16 built-in palettes - Exposure compensation: ±3 EV in 0.3-stop steps - All built-in lenses supported - Direct save to Photos CONTROLS The interface is a skeuomorphic camera body. There are no menus, no settings screens, and no editing tools. - Shutter wheel: tap to capture, spin to adjust exposure - Palette button: cycle through 16 palettes - Lens button: switch between cameras - Sub-display: shows current palette, exposure, or lens - Camera Control (iPhone 16): swipe to browse palettes, press to capture HOW IT WORKS The shader samples every pixel in the camera feed and maps it to the nearest colour in the active palette using Euclidean distance in RGB space. The result is written to the viewfinder in real time. When you tap the shutter, the current frame is upscaled 4x with nearest-neighbour interpolation and saved directly to your photo library. PALETTES Sixteen curated palettes are provided: Arafura, Spindrift, Sherbrooke, Chukhung, Poa Alpina, La Caldera, Shenzhou, Altostratus, Insolate, Daphnis 26, Hyperborea, Kobresia, Antennaria, Uva-Ursi, Endurium, and Laika. Each contains 12 colours chosen to produce distinct photographic character across a range of subjects. COMPANION Cassini Camera is a companion to the Cassini ECS-1 Electrographic Creation Suite for iPad. It shares the same palette library and the same philosophy: fewer choices, more deliberate work.

CHRO is a camera for chromatic aberration: the red, green and blue fringes a lens throws off at bright edges, giving a photo or video a dreamy, filmic look. You see it live in the viewfinder, before you press the shutter. MADE FOR IPHONE DUO Folded shut, the controls move into a bar beside the picture on the outer screen. Open it flat and every look runs live in a column beside the camera. Half open like a laptop, the picture sits above the fold and every control below it. Open, the outer screen shows your subject the shot with its look. ONE GLASS STRIP, ONE TRAY OF TOOLS The strip under your thumb holds Look, Character, the shutter, Zoom and Adjust. Swipe the picture to change look; tap Character for the effect. Adjust opens one tray above the strip: Presets, Look, Character, Lens, Blur, Grain, Tone, Colour, Exposure, Focus and White balance. PHOTO AND VIDEO Switch between PHOTO and VIDEO under the picture. In Photo, tap the shutter for a photo, or touch and hold it for a quarter of a second to record a short clip. In Video, the red shutter starts a clip with a tap and stops it with another. MANUAL CONTROLS, WITH A LIVE READOUT Set shutter speed and ISO by hand, focus by hand, and white balance from four kinds of light or a colour temperature and tint; lock any of them where it is. A live readout shows each, in yellow where you set them. RAW, QUALITY AND VIDEO FORMATS Take Apple ProRAW (or RAW), or a HEIC with your look together with the RAW. Choose the processing, and up to 48 megapixels where offered. Record video at 24, 25, 30 or 60 frames a second, as HEVC or H.264, at full size or 1080p, with stabilisation where offered. LIVE PHOTOS Turn on Live and each photo keeps about three seconds of motion and sound, saved to Photos as a Live Photo with your look on both. Open one from your library to put a look on the photo and its motion together. 22 LOOKS, AND YOUR OWN Film: fourteen looks inspired by classic film stocks. Filters: eight colour grades. Add looks of your own from a .cube file; rename, hide or reorder any look in Settings. All are live and baked into what you save. CHARACTER, GRAIN, EDGES AND TONE Character sets the lens aberration, the soft edges and the film grain together: slide up and all three grow, down to zero and they are gone. Grain comes in four patterns, Fine to Heavy. Soft edges melt the picture toward the corners. Three lens styles: Classic, Scope and Vintage. Highlights, Shadows, Sharpness, Saturation and Contrast shape the picture. PRESETS Save a look and its effects as a preset with one tap: three to start with, up to twelve. Share one with a friend and it joins their row. EDIT AFTER THE SHOT Open any photo or video from your library or Files and give it the same looks. Hold the eye to compare. Crop, rotate, trim a video, export a copy: your original is never touched. Select up to 50 to put a preset on all of them. ALSO ON YOUR MAC The CHRO editor runs on Apple silicon Macs, included with your purchase: the same looks and effects, batch editing and export to a file. The camera is on iPhone and iPad only. SHORTCUTS, LOCK SCREEN, IPAD Ten Shortcuts actions take photos and video, open the camera, set a look, Character, grain, blur, a preset or Live, and put a look on your photos and videos. Add CHRO's camera control to the Lock Screen or the Action button. On an iPad, and on a phone on its side, the camera and the editor fit the room they have. THE DETAILS • Camera Control on iPhones that have it: look and Character • Send a photo or video from the Share sheet; it all works offline PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account, no ads, no tracking, no analytics. CHRO has no servers and never sends your photos or videos anywhere on its own: they stay on your device unless you share them. Camera and microphone are used only to show and record what you point it at, including a video's or a Live Photo's sound; Photos only to save your shots and open what you pick. Questions or feedback? apps@willcox.work