Koloristika
Cinema Color Science. In your pocket.

The same color science we've spent over a decade deploying on feature films, series, and commercials now starts at the sensor of your phone.
​Every photograph built the way a frame of cinema is built. From the bottom up. From the light, through the math, to the image. For the photographer, that means a camera that behaves like nothing else in the App Store. For the cinema professional, it means something else. A scouting tool and director's viewfinder that speak the language of your camera department. Real sensor formats. Real focal length equivalents. Real metadata burned into the frame. 
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One camera. Two audiences. Same color science underneath.

A complete image pipeline takeover.

* The handshake. Teaching the iPhone sensor to speak to the color science model.

We didn't turn things off. We built each one again.

Your iPhone makes a hundred decisions before you see the photo. Face detection. Scene recognition. Exposure blending. All very clever. All very visible. That processed look. You know it. Koloristika™ bypasses all of it. No computational photography. No AI. Just raw sensor data, interpreted through color science built for feature films. Work where close enough isn't. The result is a photograph. Not a composite. Not a suggestion. A photograph.

There's an easier version of this. Disable the processing after demosaicing, turn off the AI, the noise reduction, the sharpening, the tone mapping. Many apps do exactly that. RAW editors have done it for years. It's a legitimate approach. It works.
​We didn't take it.

Koloristika™ starts at the sensor and assembles the image itself. Demosaicing. Tone mapping. Noise reduction. Color reconstruction. Every step that the phone normally handles, we handle. Every step that the phone hands to AI, we hand to color science.​

This is the less efficient approach. It's also the only one that lets us inject color science built for feature films into a photograph the moment it's taken, not as a filter laid on top, but as the way the image is built.

A trade-off, not a brag. We've been trusted to do exactly this in professional cinema and entertainment industry imaging for well over a decade. Whether that translates to a phone in your pocket is something every image taken with this app will answer for itself. That's why we built it.

The phone is the most flexible camera ever made. The most processed too. Somewhere in that tension is a question worth a seven-year answer.

​Seven years. Two models. One answer.

The color science behind the biggest films of the last decade had a name most people never heard. SUCOMO3™. Subtractive color. Ours. It shaped what blockbusters looked like. What series felt like. What a Super Bowl spot did to you in the first three seconds. Then we spent seven years asking what comes after.

DSTOCK™ is the main color model in Koloristika™. Not a sampled emulation LUT. An idealized photochemical system, the stock as it behaves when nothing has gone wrong. Fresh emulsion, correctly exposed, properly developed, scanned on a perfectly calibrated machine. Reconstructed across hundreds of negatives and prints, then distilled into a single mathematical model.

Silverlith™ is bleach bypass, built the same way. The silver-retention process that gave Saving Private Ryan, Se7en, and Minority Report their weight. Reconstructed not from one print but from an ensemble of them. The idealized form of the process, available as a slider.

Both models live inside the editor. Both run on every photograph, the moment it's taken.
​This is the first time either has been released to anyone. The cinema industry gets them next.

Multi-Axial Densitometric Reconstruction, the DSTOCK™ & Silverlith™ paper.​

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Beyond Single-Sample Characterization

Conventional film emulation begins with a single negative, a single development, a single scan. The result is a transform that faithfully reproduces that specific instance of the photochemical chain, including its accidents. Lab variance, bath exhaustion, scanner drift, exposure error, batch-to-batch emulsion variation, and operator handling are all baked into the resulting model. What gets called "the look of Stock X" is, in practice, the look of one roll of Stock X processed by one lab on one day and digitized by one scanner. DSTOCK and Silverlith are constructed on a different premise.

Methodology: Multi-Axial Densitometric Reconstruction Across an Ensemble.

Both models begin from the same core procedure The Brim has developed for empirical photochemical characterization: Multi-Axial Densitometric Reconstruction (MDR™). A precisely defined lattice of 262,144 colorimetric input points is exposed onto motion picture film via a film recorder, processed through the full photochemical chain, scanned, measured, and reconstructed into a multi-axial behavioral model of the system's response. 

​For DSTOCK™ and Silverlith™, this procedure was not performed once, and it was not performed on a single stock. It was carried out across an ensemble spanning multiple motion picture emulsions (different stocks, different speeds, different formulations) and across many exposures, many negatives, many development runs, many print generations, and many scans, drawn from multiple labs, multiple scanner calibrations, and multiple processing conditions. The intent was not to characterize a particular stock or a particular instance of the photochemical chain, but to identify the underlying mechanisms common to analog motion picture film as a class: the behavioral signature that separates photochemical imaging from electronic imaging at a fundamental level. 

This places the work closer in spirit to ensemble system identification than to LUT generation. In control-systems terms: rather than estimating a transfer function from a single noisy observation, the model is reconstructed from a population of observations, allowing the recovery of the system's intrinsic behavior independent of run-to-run perturbation.

From Measured Ensemble to Idealized Form.

The reconstructed ensemble defines a distribution of behaviors across stocks and across processing conditions. From that distribution, an idealized form is derived: a model representing analog motion picture film operating under optimal conditions across every stage of the pipeline:
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• A fresh, in-spec emulsion.
• Correctly metered and exposed.
• Developed in properly maintained chemistry, on schedule, at temperature.
• Scanned on a well-calibrated, well-aligned scanner.

​DSTOCK™ is not a recording of a particular roll of any particular stock. It is the reconstructed idealization of analog motion picture film as a photochemical system: the medium as it behaves when nothing has gone wrong. This distinguishes the model from sample-based emulations in a meaningful way: degradation, drift, and lab-specific signature are characterized as variance to be removed, not preserved as character.

Silverlith™ and Differential Characterization.

Silverlith™ was constructed by the same ensemble methodology, applied to a different photochemical process. The 262,144-point lattice was printed onto negative stock and processed without bleach, retaining the silver alongside the dye image. The resulting frames were scanned. The same physical frames were then returned to chemistry, bleached to remove the retained silver, and scanned a second time. The bleach-bypass transform was derived as the differential between the two scans: the measured contribution of silver retention, isolated from every other variable in the pipeline. 

​This is a meaningful methodological distinction. Because both scans were taken from the same physical frames on the same scanner with the same calibration, the differential cancels out emulsion variance, exposure variance, scanner signature, lab handling, and every other source of error common to the two states. What remains is the bleach-bypass function in its purest measurable form: the transform attributable to silver retention and silver retention alone. 

Performed across the ensemble, this differential characterization yields the idealized bleach-bypass transform: the process as a mathematical function rather than as the appearance of a particular print.

Silverlith in Koloristika:
​Two Directions of a Single Axis.

Within Koloristika, Silverlith is exposed as the Bleach Bypass control, and the axis behaves differently in each direction because it is operating on a measured rather than synthesized function. 

In the positive direction, the slider applies the silver-retention transform itself, allowing the user to control the degree of bleach bypass continuously, from a clean dye image through to fully retained silver. This is what a bleach-bypass control conventionally does, but here the underlying function is the idealized transform reconstructed from the differential, not an approximation of one print's appearance. ​
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In the negative direction, the slider applies the mathematical inverse of the silver-retention transform, and this turns out to do something genuinely distinct. Because Silverlith is constructed as the differential between silver-retained and silver-removed states, inverting it does not simply produce a counter-effect or a stylistic opposite. It operates on the dye record alone, scaling the relationship between dye layers in the direction opposite to silver retention's contribution.

​In practical terms, this allows the user to traverse a range of dye-density ratios that correspond to the kinds of variation seen across different properly developed and scanned film stocks. Different emulsions exhibit different dye-layer densities and different inter-layer balances when correctly processed. The negative direction of the Silverlith axis approximates this space of variation, because the mathematics of inverting a silver-retention differential happen to map onto the same axis along which dye-record differences between stocks tend to vary. This was not a designed feature. It emerged from the mathematics of the reconstruction itself.

What This Yields.

The single Bleach Bypass control in Koloristika™ therefore exposes two distinct photochemical operations sharing one mathematical axis: silver-retention control in one direction, dye-density emulation in the other. Both are derived from the same reconstructed differential, and both are meaningful because the function under the slider was measured, not invented.

Because both models are reconstructions of underlying photochemical mechanisms (DSTOCK™ of analog film as a class, Silverlith™ of the bleach-bypass transform as a function) rather than recordings of specific outputs, they exhibit several properties that sample-based emulations do not:

• Stability. Neither model carries the signature of any one stock, lab, scanner, or processing run.
• Behavioral coherence under extrapolation. Because the response is mechanistically reconstructed across the ensemble, the models behave predictably under conditions that were not specifically sampled.
• Mathematical invertibility. Idealized reconstructions admit clean inverse operations, which is what makes Silverlith's negative-value inverse meaningful rather than approximate.

Position Within The Brim's Methodology.

DSTOCK™ and Silverlith™ sit at the highest tier of The Brim's photochemical modeling work. Single-instance MDR™ produces accurate models of specific film/lab/scanner combinations and is appropriate for matching a particular pipeline. The ensemble-derived idealizations represent something different: reconstructions of photochemical systems and processes, of analog film as a medium and bleach bypass as a function, expressed in forms that are stable, invertible, and independent of any one realization of the chain.

​They are, in the most literal sense, idealized photochemical models.
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DSTOCK™ is what analog film is, separated from what any one stock or any one instance of it happened to be.
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Silverlith™ is what bleach bypass does, separated from any one print on which it was performed.

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​​We are updating the camera.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that astronauts on the International Space Station will now carry smartphones. Not to make calls. Not to run apps. To take pictures. NASA's position is plain. A smartphone is, first and foremost, a camera. Everyone has known this for a while. Apple builds the most advanced camera in the world, and it happens to make phone calls. The hardware is extraordinary. The processing is the problem. So we set out to update the camera. Not the lens. Not the sensor. Those are Apple's. Those are extraordinary already.

Everything else.

Demosaicing. Noise reduction. Color reconstruction. The pipeline we replaced. Then the things a camera is supposed to do beyond capturing the image, the controls, the metering, the gallery, the metadata, the way you find one photograph among ten thousand, the way you hand one to someone else.

Koloristika™ is a complete camera rebuild.

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What follows is what we built.

​​Dynamic Range Extension
​Two extra stops. One shot.

One frame captured, rendered twice, fused by luminance. Shadows stay where the sensor put them. Highlights gain two stops of recovery that would have clipped on a single render. Not HDR. HDR fires multiple exposures and stitches them, works until something moves. DRX™ uses one frame. Nothing to misalign. A window-lit room. A sky at dusk. The room stays a room. The window stays a window.

ON by default. Worth it.

​Highlight Priority Metering
Most cameras meter for the middle.

This one meters for the brightest thing in the frame. A window, a sky, a lamp. The metering finds it and exposes for it. The reasoning is asymmetric. Shadows can be lifted in the RAW. Highlights cannot. Once a pixel reaches the ceiling, what was above it is gone. Your images will look darker than you're used to. That's the point. The shadows are in the RAW, waiting to be lifted.
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OFF by default. Pairs with DRX™.

​Color Locus Reset
The blur era is over.

For forty years, the answer to digital noise has been to blur it. CLR™ is a different answer. It identifies noise by where it lives in color space, not by how it looks. In 1931, the CIE drew a boundary around the colors light can physically make. Chroma noise,  pink, purple, magenta sparkle at high ISO, lives outside that boundary. CLR™ walks it back. The grain stays. Only the colors that couldn't exist are corrected.

Engages above 700 ISO. Hands off below.

Tone Seed
​Eight characters. Your look, anywhere.

Every edit in Koloristika™ has a code. Eight characters that encode the six sliders. The code lives in the editor, updates live, travels with the photograph. Share the code, share the look. Type a code someone else sent and your sliders match theirs instantly. Tokyo and LA shooting the same look without sending a file. Color Science Only in Settings drops the code to four characters. Pure color, no exposure. The style without the substance.
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A code is a look, compressed.
​Carry your edits with you.

Formulations
When you know what you want.

Three slots, F1, F2, F3, each holding a complete formulation: Silverlith™, exposure, upper density, temperature, tint, saturation. Set a slot. Tap to select. Every frame captured while it's active is rendered through that formulation at capture. Not a filter applied after. The look the photograph is built with, not the look painted over a finished image. A night out. A scout day. A wedding. Set the formulation before the first frame. Stop thinking about it.

Title each one. "Cinematic." "Night."
​Whatever helps you remember.

Scout Mode
A camera department, in a pocket.

The part of Koloristika™ built for the people who scout, direct, and have to know what lens to order before the truck arrives. Real sensor formats from Super16, 35mm, VistaVision, 65-Vertical to 65mm IMAX. Real focal length equivalents drawn from the lens sets that actually shot each format. Real metadata burned into the frame. Hand the export to your DP. They'll know what to do with it. Hand it to a producer. They'll start counting lenses.
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The full Scout Mode walkthrough
​is further down the page. 

​The Lineage
​
The vectorscope was built for engineers. A circular trace on green phosphor, hue read as angle, saturation as distance from center. A Tektronix in a broadcast truck, answering one question, is this signal legal, for people who already knew how to read a circle. A colorist learned to see the round graticule the way a sailor reads a sextant. Precise, and closed to everyone outside the post-production suite.

We asked a simpler question. If hue is an angle, and the eye reads color before anything else, why is the most fundamental color instrument the hardest one in the building to read? The circle isn’t sacred. It’s an artifact of the oscilloscope, of the chroma signal flowing through it. The shape came from the hardware, not from the color. 

​So we unrolled it. We cut the round trace and laid the spectrum out flat, left to right, each hue sized by its share of the frame, live and responsive. The same data the vectorscope carries, freed from the geometry of a 1950s vector display tube. Angle becomes position. A hue’s share becomes its width on the strip. The reading a colorist spent years internalizing, legible at a glance, the first time you see it.

That’s the whole of it. A broadcast engineer’s instrument, rebuilt for the modern era and made readable for everyone. Out of the phosphor and the graticules, into the viewfinder of the phone in your pocket. Not simplified. Translated. The rigor stays. The priesthood goes.
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​Color, made readable.
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Color is the first thing the eye reads. A film's identity, before anything else, is its palette. The strip you've seen pulled from In the Mood for Love, from Léon, from Children of Men. Seven dominant hues, weighted by area, laid out side by side. That extract has been a grading exercise for as long as anyone's been making them. Chromogram™ runs it live, at capture, inside the viewfinder.

The bar below the shutter shows the seven dominant hues in the frame, sized by how much of each is on screen right now. Move closer to a color, it grows. Step away, it shrinks. Tilt the phone, the weighting redistributes. Color stops being something you discover in the photograph after the fact and becomes something you compose with at the moment you press the shutter.

​On export, the same palette can be burned into the JPEG. The strip carries the chip colors themselves, the weight percentages, vectorscope angles, contrast ratio in stops, and the median IRE. The numbers a colorist would write on a notebook beside the frame. The data the grading suite asks for, present on the image itself. In the viewfinder, the pie button toggles the overlay. On export, the Chromogram™ toggle in the dialog handles the bake. Stacks cleanly with FRAMESTAMP if you want the location and the palette on one edge.
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The palette extract you've seen pulled from your favorite films. Now live. Now baked into the frame, if you want it there.

Seven engineered systems. The rest of the camera assembled around them.

Behind every named feature is a hundred unnamed ones. The way the histogram updates in real time under the exposure scale. The way the horizon level rotates with gravity, gets out of the way when it isn't needed, lights up when you cross level. The way the focus point holds when you press your finger down, releases when you tap somewhere else. The way the front camera turns the screen into continuous light. The way you can lock focus to infinity for a landscape, or to closest for a macro, with the same gesture you already know.
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Every photograph carries metadata you can find later. Type a lens multiplier and the gallery filters. Type a city. Type "edited landscapes in Tokyo shot with Formulation 2" and the grid obeys. Five smart albums file the work for you, only appearing when there's something to file. Copy the edit from one frame, paste it to another. Hold any image for before-and-after. Hold any slider for a number pad, when the finger isn't enough.

A hundred small decisions. None of them filler.

This is what happens when a color science lab builds a camera.

Every feature above is a piece of cinema discipline, ported. Dynamic range handled the way film handled it, one frame, one decision, the highlight preserved on principle. Metering oriented around what cannot be recovered, not what is easiest to expose. Show LUTs applied at capture, named per project, recalled by tap. Chroma noise removed by physics, not by softening the image. Looks shared the way grading shops have shared them for decades, as a string of characters between machines. A camera department's worth of formats, focal lengths, and metadata, available on the back of your hand. None of these features are new ideas. They are answers worked out, by cinema, over a hundred years of trying to make light into image. What is new is putting them inside a camera that fits in a pocket, on a sensor most people already own. We've been a vendor to motion picture and advertising productions for a long time. We will keep adding to this app the way we've always worked: slowly, deliberately, and with reasons we can explain.

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​This is the camera as we built it. The rest of the page is the rest of the app.

​Shot on Koloristika

The Photochemical Editor

Every photograph in Koloristika™ is editable. Tap it. You're in. Six sliders. Six photochemical models. Silverlith™. Exposure. Upper Density. Temperature. Tint. Saturation. Each one was built the same way. Real film, exposed across a quarter-million data points, developed, scanned, measured, modeled. Math that knows what film does because it watched film do it. This is not a curves panel with new labels. This is not a tone curve dressed in nostalgia. It is what happens when you ask the question what would this slider do if it were made of silver halide and then spend years answering it. Drag horizontal for big moves. Drag vertical for precision. Double-tap to reset. Hold for a number pad, sometimes the finger isn't enough. Every edit is non-destructive. Every edit saves itself the moment you swipe away. Every edit writes back to the original in your Photos library, and updates if you change it again. A Tone Seed travels with every edit. Eight characters. Your look, compressed. Share the code, share the look. Different phones, different continents, same look. Other editors started from the assumption that a slider is a slider, a mathematical operator with a friendly name. Increase saturation: multiply the chroma channel. Adjust temperature: shift the white point. The model underneath is the same model that ships in every consumer app. We started from a different assumption. That a slider should behave the way a photochemical process behaves. That density should respond like density. That exposure should reach the negative, not the JPG. That a polarizer should be reachable without glass. That subtractive color should actually subtract. The math is harder. The result is a photograph that responds the way film responded, across decades, across stocks, across the most rigorous color pipelines in the world.
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​This is what every slider in Koloristika™ is. A photochemical model with a user-facing handle.

 ● Silverlith™ 
Moves the photograph from negative to positive. From rich color layers to silver-retained, bleach-bypass weight. Two photochemical states, measured against each other, turned into a single axis.

 ● ​Exposure 
Doesn't brighten a finished image. It reaches the raw sensor data directly. Full bit depth. Full latitude. Three stops in either direction. The color science responds to every shift, because the color science is reading the same data you're moving.

 ● Upper Density 
Is a model with a history. Built by The Brim. Used quietly on productions and partners who knew to ask for it. Never publicly available, until now. It adds density to the upper tones. Where sky meets atmosphere. Where light meets color. Some of what a polarizing filter does to a frame, achieved in color science instead of glass. Pull negative and the slider goes subtractive. Color drains from highlights. Whites move toward paper white.


 ● Temperature and Tint 
Set the mood, and they change everything underneath. Both operate on raw data. You're not washing color over a finished image. You're changing the foundation the color science builds from.

 ● Saturation 
​Is subtractive. Light removed, not added. The lineage of SUCOMO3™ lives here.

​Scout Mode

Scout Mode is the part of Koloristika™ built for the camera department. For the cinematographer driving the location two months before the shoot. For the director with a frame in their head and three days to find it. For the producer trying to figure out what lens they need to order.
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It is not an aspect ratio overlay. It is not a filter that makes your phone look like a movie. It is a scouting tool, built by people who have been on the back of a van at six in the morning, holding a phone up to a window, trying to remember whether a 32 wide on Super 35 would clear the foreground.
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A camera department, in your pocket.

Scout Mode Formats

Let's settle something first.

There is a persistent myth that focal length behaves differently on different sensors. That a 50mm lens is somehow a different 50mm on Super 16 than on VistaVision than on a phone. It isn't. Angle of view is angle of view. Compression is a function of distance, not format. A lens that sees 39° of horizontal field sees 39° regardless of what's behind it. What changes is which number gets used to describe that 39°. On Super 35, it's a 32mm. On VistaVision, it's a 47mm. On a 65mm vertical sensor, it's a 60mm. Same field of view. Different name. Because the name depends on the diagonal of the sensor the lens is throwing onto. Scout Mode is, at its core, a translator. Your iPhone has a lens. That lens sees a specific field of view. Scout Mode tells you what that field of view is called on the format you're going to shoot. The number changes. The frame doesn't. This is how every lens chart in the industry has worked for a century. Scout Mode just puts the chart on the back of your hand.

Super 16 ● 
​Black Swan. The Hurt Locker. Carol. The format of the documentary tradition. The ARRIFLEX 416 and SR3. 12.52 × 7.41mm of frame, smaller than a fingernail. Scout Mode covers Zeiss Ultra 16s, Optex glass, the Master Zoom 16.5–110. Real cinema increments, fractional millimeters included.

Super 35 ● ​
​Inception. Children of Men. No Country for Old Men. The default format of modern cinema. ARRICAM LT. ARRIFLEX 235. Panaflex Millennium XL2. Scout Mode covers Master Primes, Cooke S4s and S7s, Panavision Primos, ARRI Signature Primes. 10mm to 150mm in the increments rental houses ship.

VistaVision ● ​
​The Brutalist. And every Paramount feature of the 1950s. And every ILM plate since. 35mm film pulled horizontally, eight perforations per frame. 37.72 × 24.92mm. Scout Mode covers the format with full-frame and VV-compatible glass. 16mm through 200mm, in the increments the lens sets are built around.

65mm Vertical ● ​
​The Master. The Revenant. Dune. ARRIFLEX 765. ALEXA 65. 65mm film or sensor, five perforations per frame, 52.48 × 23.01mm of image. Scout Mode covers Prime 65s, Vintage 765s, Hasselblad H-system, Leitz Thalia 65s. 35mm to 350mm, the longest reach in any format here.

65mm Horizontal ● ​
​Dunkirk. Tenet. Oppenheimer. True 15-perf IMAX. The MSM 9802. 70.41 × 52.63mm, 3.5 times the area of a standard 65mm vertical frame. Scout Mode covers Hasselblads, IMAX-rated Sphero 65s, the wider Prime 65s. 25mm to 300mm. The format already does what longer lenses do.

Scout Mode in Full

A note on the engineering: Scout Mode is capture-time only. The frame is cropped at the moment the shutter is pressed. The RAW retains the full sensor. You can re-edit the photo later and recover what was outside the frame. The crop is creative; the data is preserved.

 ● Focal Length Equivalents
Translates your iPhone's lens FOV into the focal length name used on each of the five formats. Live in the viewfinder, embedded in EXIF, burned into FRAMESTAMP.

 ● Expanded Focal Lengths
When you need a longer lens than the phone has. The +/- buttons step through simulated focal lengths by cropping the sensor, real fractional values where the lens sets use them (5.5mm, 9.5mm, 9.8mm on Super 16). Cinematography ratios only. Output resolution decreases as you crop in.

 ● Aspect Ratios
Cinematography family: 2-perf Techniscope, 3-perf 1.78:1, 4-perf Academy, 5-perf Todd-AO, 8-perf VistaVision, 15-perf IMAX. Photography family: 4:3, 3:2, 6:6, 5:4, 7:6, 65:24. Preview and capture crop to match. What you frame is what you get.

 ● Geotagging
GPS coordinates embedded in every file. On-device, never transmitted, never collected. The frame and the place travel together.
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 ● ​FRAMESTAMP
Two-line metadata bar burned into exported JPEGs. Format name, focal length equivalent, aspect ratio, capture device, location, coordinates, date, time with timezone. Everything the crew needs is on the frame.

Scout Mode Beyond the Set

Scout Mode is named for the location scout, but the formats reach beyond cinema. The 6:6 square is the format of the Hasselblad 500. Of Vivian Maier's Rolleiflex. Of every medium-format square frame that's ever taught a photographer to compose without a horizon to lean on. Scout Mode previews it live, and your iPhone shoots it like a 6×6 camera. The 7:6 is the 6×7 format. The portrait format of the late twentieth century, Mamiya RB67, Pentax 67, the frame Annie Leibovitz built a career on. Wider than square but not as wide as 35mm still. The frame that flatters faces. The 65:24 is the XPan. A 1998 Hasselblad–Fujifilm collaboration that captured 65mm-wide panoramic frames on standard 35mm film. The iPhone's main lens sees 74° of horizontal field. So does the XPan's 45mm. Same field of view. Same aspect ratio. Different century. Koloristika™ adds the color, and 65:24 among its many frames. 3:2, 5:4, and the native 4:3 round out the photography set. Each one chosen because someone built a career inside its proportions, and because there are still photographers who want to compose within the constraints of a format rather than the freedoms of the sensor. Same Scout Mode. Same FRAMESTAMP. Same focal length translations. Just different traditions.

A scouting tool, a director's viewfinder, and a medium-format camera. In your pocket. With cinema color science.

​Capture & Gallery

Most camera apps are two surfaces: the viewfinder and the photo. Everything between them is a thumbnail strip and a share sheet. Koloristika™ is built differently. Capture, gallery, search, batch operations, and export are one continuous surface, designed for photographers who don't stop working when the shutter releases.

 ● ​Capture

The viewfinder is clean. The overlays you need appear when you ask for them, and disappear when you don't. Rule of thirds. Three-by-four grid. Center point. Horizon level. Highlight clipping shown as yellow dots, not as a warning, just as the truth about where data ends. Monochromatic Preview strips the viewfinder to black and white when you want to compose for tone, while the RAW underneath stays in full color. Montage Anchor lets you set a scalable shape, circle or rectangle, that locks to the same screen position across multiple shots. Place it on a wheel, a clock, a doorknob, the curve of a glass. Shoot a series. The objects align frame to frame. Match cuts, planned at capture, instead of fixed in post. Continuous light, not flash. A single tap on the top-left dot turns on the LED. Drag down to dim. Flip to the front camera and the screen becomes the light, with the same gesture. Continuous because a flash fires once and hopes. Continuous because the camera should see what you see.

 ● Gallery

Newest first. Years organize themselves. Every photograph is a RAW with a JPEG attached, the JPEG is what you see, the RAW is where the possibilities live. Thumbnails carry small badges in the top right corner. Yellow dot for favorite. White dot for edited. Numbered dots for the Formulation that was active at capture. Glance at the grid, know which photographs you've worked on, which ones are still untouched, and which recipe shot them. Filter the grid by combination. Edited photographs only. Edited photographs shot with Formulation 2. Favorites shot with no Formulation at all. Tap to add filters; the grid obeys. Calendar view and Map view let you find a photograph by when or where you took it. Months and days, or pins on a map. Both filterable, both fast.

 ● ​Search

Type anything. Lens multipliers like 0.5x, 2x. Focal lengths in millimeters. Format names: Super 35, IMAX, XPan. Cinema terms: anamorphic, wide, portrait. Aspect ratios. Recipe slots. Cities, neighborhoods, parks. Orientations. Edit states. If metadata can't find what you typed, the search falls through to on-device vision. Cat. Sky. Beach. Building. Skin. The vision model runs locally, never on a server. Combine search terms with commas. Each one narrows the result. Edited landscapes in Tokyo shot with Formulation 2, five words, one search, the grid filters down to the frames that match.

Smart Albums ● 

Your iOS Photos library sorts itself. Originals land in Koloristika Origination. Clean JPEG exports land in Koloristika Distribute. TIFF exports land in Koloristika Print. FRAMESTAMPED exports land in Koloristika Scout. Albums appear only when they need to, if you never export a TIFF, there's no empty Koloristika Print folder cluttering the library. The filing does itself.

Batch & Montage Export ● 

Select multiple photographs. Tap Export. Pick a format, pick a quality, and every selected frame is processed with its own individual edits intact. Nothing flattens, nothing averages, nothing overrides per-photo decisions. Montage Export turns a selection into video. Four codecs, H.264 for sharing, H.265 for smaller files, ProRes Proxy for drafts, ProRes 422 for editing. Choose the playback frame rate (24, 25, 30, 23.976, 29.97 for broadcast standards). Choose the images-per-second pace (1 for slideshow, 12 for a flicker). Repeats. Sequence selection. Round the corners of any export by 0 to 7 percent of the short edge, Gate Radius. A working photographer's output, formed inside the app.

FRAMESTAMP ● ​

A two-line metadata bar burned into exported JPEGs, when you want it. Format name, focal length equivalent, aspect ratio, capture device, app name. Location, coordinates, date, time with timezone. Sized proportionally to the frame's aspect ratio. Always readable. Toggle it on when you need it. Toggle it off when you don't.

Quick Access

A camera you can't reach is not a camera. Koloristika™ is on every surface iOS lets it be on.

Control Center Button
A larger button in the Control Center pull-down. Swipe down from the top right, tap once, Koloristika™ opens. Add it as a Home or Lock Screen widget for the same one-tap reach, anywhere in the system. 

​Camera Control 
​iPhone 16 and later, the physical button on the side of the phone. Set Koloristika™ as the default camera in iOS Settings, and one press from anywhere opens the app. Locked, unlocked, doesn't matter.

Lock Screen Control
Replace the camera icon on your Lock Screen. One tap and Koloristika is open, without unlocking the phone. Set it once in iOS Settings, Lock Screen, Customize, tap the camera, Replace with Koloristika.

Three ways in, same destination. Pick the one your thumb prefers.

CONFIDENTIALITY

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​A camera for people who can't afford to be careless.

Scouts photograph locations they were not invited into. Journalists photograph people who would prefer not to be photographed. Set photographers shoot under embargo. Location photographers in jurisdictions where mishandling a frame is a legal problem, not a portfolio one. Most camera apps were not designed with any of this in mind. Koloristika™ was. The privacy architecture of the app is not a setting buried in a menu. It is the way the app was built from the first commit.

No accounts. No sign-in. No identifier.

The app does not require an account. There is no email collected, no phone number captured, no profile created. The app does not assign you an identifier of any kind that follows you across sessions. If you delete the app, there is nothing left behind on any server, because nothing was ever sent to a server. The deletion is the end of it. The app forgets you because there was never anything for it to remember. There is no "account recovery." There is no account.

On device, full stop.

​Every operation that touches your photographs happens on your phone. The color science runs on the GPU. The metadata is written by the OS. The vision search that indexes your library uses Apple's on-device vision framework. The geotagging is embedded in the EXIF by the same system that takes the photograph. There is no cloud round-trip for any of it. Your photographs do not leave your device unless you send them somewhere yourself.

Stealth Export.

A capture-and-export setting for situations where the file itself cannot be traceable. Every photograph carries metadata, camera model, capture timestamp, GPS coordinates, software identifiers. The setting strips all of it. The exported JPEG or TIFF carries the pixels and nothing else. For photojournalists. For documentary work. For anyone whose file might end up somewhere they cannot follow it.

No telemetry. None.

​We do not collect usage data. We do not collect device data. We do not collect crash data, Apple does, if you opted in to Apple's diagnostics when you set up your phone, and that data goes to Apple under their privacy policy. We do not know how many of your photographs were edited, which sliders you moved, which Formulations you set, or how often you opened the app today. We do not know because we did not build the system that would tell us. This is not a feature we toggle off in privacy mode. It is the absence of a system that would have collected that data in the first place.

Why this section exists.

The "we don't collect anything" claim has been made by every indie app for a decade. It is the right claim. It is also stale, because so many apps that have made it turned out to have made it carelessly. We are stating it differently here because the people we built this for are not consumers worried about advertising. They are professionals whose work product is confidential by default. The privacy posture of Koloristika™ is not a moral statement about data minimalism. It is the operating requirement of the people whose photographs the app exists to serve.

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The same position, in legal language: Privacy Policy & Terms of Service.

A camera built from the ground up.

The Brim® Industrial Imaging Bureau has built color science for cinema since 2015. Features. Series. The commercials that defined a decade of advertising. Our work has lived inside professional camera pipelines, color grading suites, and post-production houses on all continents. Koloristika™ is the first time any of it has shipped to a person, not a production.

The decision to build a complete camera, rather than a filter, was made on the first day of the project and never revisited. There is no version of this that worked as a layer on top of Apple's processing. The whole point was to replace that processing with something built from a decade of doing exactly this work, at the level where mistakes cost real money and the audience is your peer group.

The features above are what came of that decision. The color science is one of them. The metering is another. The metadata system, the editor, the gallery, each one rebuilt because the alternative was inheriting the assumptions of a camera designed for a different problem.

What you have on your iPhone right now is a camera that happens to take phone calls. What you have when you open Koloristika™ is the camera underneath it, doing what the hardware was always capable of.

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The iPhone never needed more processing. It needed different processing.

Koloristika™ on the App Store.

36 shots free. No clock.