**Adobe’s Project Indigo: A New Chapter in Mobile Photography**
For avid photographers, the prosumer camera application market has experienced an influx of groundbreaking choices, with well-known favorites such as Halide at the forefront. Recently, Adobe has made its entrance into this competitive realm with Project Indigo, a complimentary experimental app crafted by the team responsible for the original Google Pixel camera.
**Reduced “Smartphone Aesthetic”**
Project Indigo seeks to tackle prevalent grievances regarding smartphone photography, including excessively bright images, insufficient contrast, and high color saturation. The application is structured to deliver a more organic, SLR-like appearance, appealing to both casual photographers and advanced users in pursuit of superior quality images. Adobe envisions a unified mobile camera and editing interface that capitalizes on the most recent developments in computational photography and AI.
**Computational Photography Focused on Imagery**
One of the notable attributes of Project Indigo is its method of multi-frame image capture. The application can amalgamate up to 32 underexposed frames to produce a singular shot, effectively diminishing noise and retaining highlight details. Although this method resembles HDR or Night mode found in standard smartphone cameras, Project Indigo affords enhanced control and employs more frames, yielding clearer shadows and an improved dynamic range. Importantly, this multi-frame processing is applicable even when shooting RAW/DNG files, a rarity in smartphone camera applications.
**Comprehensive Manual Controls and Beyond**
Project Indigo offers comprehensive manual controls, enabling users to modify focus, ISO, shutter speed, white balance, and exposure compensation. Furthermore, it grants control over the number of frames taken in a burst, allowing photographers to balance capture time against noise levels. The application also includes a Long Exposure mode, ideal for producing creative motion blur effects.
**Digital Zoom Without Sacrifice**
The application enhances digital zoom quality through multi-frame super-resolution. When zooming past 2x, Project Indigo captures several slightly displaced frames, utilizing natural hand movements to improve image sharpness. This approach circumvents the drawbacks of AI-enhanced super-resolution, which may at times create artificial details, ensuring a more genuine outcome.
**Designed for Lightroom Users**
As an Adobe creation, Project Indigo easily integrates with Lightroom Mobile. Users can conveniently transfer images for editing, whether in JPEG or DNG format. The app features profile and metadata support, enabling Lightroom to distinguish between Project Indigo’s SDR and HDR styles during the editing phase.
**Experimental Features Included**
Project Indigo serves as a platform for testing potential features that may be incorporated into Adobe’s wider ecosystem. One noteworthy initial feature is an AI-driven “Remove Reflections” mode, aimed at enhancing photos captured through glass or windows.
**Availability and Recommendations**
Project Indigo is compatible with all iPhone Pro and Pro Max models beginning with the iPhone 12, as well as non-Pro iPhones from the iPhone 14 onward. The app is free and does not necessitate an Adobe account. However, given the app’s demanding image processing needs, Adobe advises using it on newer iPhone models for optimal performance.
For those eager to delve into Project Indigo, it can be downloaded from the App Store, and users are encouraged to view sample images on the Project Indigo website to appreciate its features.
