Cassini Camera

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.