What is Citus Camera

Perfect was never the point

Ever noticed that your iPhone photos are perfect, and that none of them feel like anything?

That is what a phone camera is built for: correct, every time. Correct is what a machine wants from a picture. It is rarely what you remember about one.

Citus puts a film look in the viewfinder, before you press the shutter. Not a filter over a finished picture: the film is there while you compose, so you frame for it and shoot a photograph that is already done. Grain and all. Every look began as a real roll, scanned and measured, or was built by hand with the same care. It runs entirely on the phone. No account, no tracking, no subscription.

Measured, not imagined

Film never tried to be correct. It warmed skin, let highlights roll off instead of clipping, and left grain in the shadows. Flaws, technically. Also most of what people mean by character.

Citus measures those flaws. Real rolls are shot, scanned and characterised, and the measurements become the looks. What you see in the viewfinder is a film's behaviour, live, so you make the photograph you can already see. And every photograph remembers how it was made: the look, the grain, every setting is written inside the file. Hand a frame to someone and the recipe travels with it. Find one you love months later and lift the recipe straight out.

A film lab, built the same measured way, follows as a free update.

What ships

• 28 looks at launch, plus none: a free set and three packs. Measured from scanned film or handcrafted with the same method.
• Live in the viewfinder, before the shutter. Up to 48MP, ProRAW on supported iPhones.
• Grain rendered into the image, with amount, size and colour or mono. Tone, clarity, structure, saturation, vibrance, white balance, an eight-channel black and white mixer, vignette, fringe, motion blur. All live at capture.
• Every photograph carries its full recipe inside the file, readable by any photo tool. Lift, save and share recipes.
• Everything on the device. No image leaves the phone. Free to download; Pro and the three packs are one-time purchases. No subscription.