The iPhone 16 Pro has already impressed us with its amazing image quality, comfortably holding its own against other top-end Android phones including the Galaxy S25 Ultra and Pixel 9 Pro. And while the default camera app makes it easy to take quick snaps, it lacks features that enthusiastic photographers need. But where Apple left a gap, Adobe has rushed to fill in.
Enlarge Image The instant shutter allowed me to capture this bird at just the right moment. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
Adobe's new camera app -- called Indigo -- offers granular control over camera settings like white balance and shutter speed while also packing AI-based features like resolution upscaling for 10x zoom, denoising and reflection removal tools.
The app is available now for iPhone, so like the excitable photographer I am, I took it for a quick spin around Edinburgh.
I love this first shot of a bird flying through Edinburgh's Royal Mile. I've taken advantage of two features here. Firstly, the manual white balance has allowed me to slightly warm the scene up, as I often find that the iPhone's default camera app tends to lean on the cool side. I love the tones captured here. Secondly, the app features a zero-lag shutter, which allowed me to quickly capture the moment the bird was perfectly in line with the church spire.
It's a difficult shot to nail, but having no delay between pressing the shutter button and the image taking makes all the difference. Adobe says it achieves this by "constantly capturing raw images while the viewfinder is running," meaning that the image has technically already been captured when you press the button. For those of you wanting to snag high-drama shots of football games or your dog jumping for a frisbee, a zero-lag shutter is a boon.
Image taken at 10x optical zoom with denoise applied within the Adobe Indigo app. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
While the iPhone's base optical zoom maxes out at 5x, Adobe's Indigo app lets you digitally zoom in further with better quality. Using AI and combining multiple frames to upscale those images, they retain more detail than simply zooming in to 10x in the regular camera app. I used it here and I'm impressed at the overall clarity of the scene.
The difference in sharpness between the original image (right) and the AI Denoise version (left) isn't immediately obvious, but it does help give the scene a bit more crispness overall. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
I also ran the app's AI Denoise tool on the image. While there wasn't much image noise to begin with, the tool has the added benefit of sharpening up an image, which has really helped bring some extra fine detail to the blades of grass and tree bark. I'm impressed here, as the image doesn't look overly digitally sharpened, which can often be the case with these kinds of tools. Instead, the image looks natural and surprisingly clear for a zoomed-in shot.
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