For photography enthusiasts, the prosumer camera app market has had no shortage of great options, with longtime favorites like Halide from Lux leading the pack. Now, Adobe has decided to enter the picture (get it?) with a free experimental app from the same team behind the original Google Pixel camera.
If you remember the early days of the Google Pixel and its heavy focus on computational photography, you already have a sense of what this team, now at Adobe, cares about and is capable of. Its new app, Project Indigo, brings that same spirit to the iPhone, but with a few key differences.
Less “smartphone look”
At its core, Project Indigo is Adobe’s answer to the biggest complaints about smartphone photos today: “overly bright, low contrast, high color saturation, strong smoothing, and strong sharpening“.
Here’s how the team behind Project Indigo presents the app:
This is the beginning of a journey for Adobe – towards an integrated mobile camera and editing experience that takes advantage of the latest advances in computational photography and AI. Our hope is that Indigo will appeal to casual mobile photographers who want a natural SLR-like look for their photos, including when viewed on large screens; to advanced photographers who want manual control and the highest possible image quality; and to anyone – casual or serious – who enjoys playing with new photographic experiences.
Computational photography, with an emphasis on photography
Project Indigo takes an interesting approach to multi-frame image capture, combining up to 32 underexposed frames for a single shot to reduce noise and preserve highlight detail. If that sounds like what your iPhone’s default camera does with HDR or Night mode… it is. But Project Indigo pushes things further, with more control and more frames.
The trade-off? You’ll sometimes wait a few extra seconds after pressing the shutter, but the payoff is cleaner shadows, less noise, and more dynamic range.
Another nice touch: Project Indigo applies this same multi-frame computational stack even when outputting RAW/DNG files, not just JPEGs. That’s something most smartphone camera apps don’t do.
... continue reading