Adobe Unveils Project Indigo: New Camera App for iPhone
Adobe has unveiled its latest innovation, Project Indigo, a dedicated camera app for iPhone users. This new app builds on the company’s recent offerings, including Firefly and Photoshop, and is designed to enhance smartphone photography through advanced computational techniques. Project Indigo allows users to capture up to 32 frames and merge them into a single high-quality image, utilizing artificial intelligence to support both standard dynamic range (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) formats. The app is compatible with Adobe’s Camera Raw and Lightroom, making it a versatile tool for photography enthusiasts.
Features of Project Indigo
Adobe’s Project Indigo app aims to address common issues associated with smartphone photography, often characterized by overly bright images, low contrast, and excessive color saturation. While these images may look acceptable on smaller screens, they can appear unrealistic when viewed on larger displays. To combat this, Project Indigo offers a free-to-download experimental app on the App Store, providing users with full manual controls. These controls include adjustments for aperture, exposure time, ISO, focus, and white balance, with separate settings for temperature and tint.
Upon launching the app, users can choose between two modes: Photo and Night. The Photo mode is tailored for daytime shooting, while the Night mode employs longer exposure times to reduce noise and capture more frames with each shutter press. This feature enhances stabilization and minimizes hand-shake during long-exposure photography at night. Adobe claims that Project Indigo delivers a more natural, SLR-like appearance to images, ensuring the highest possible quality.
Computational Photography Enhancements
The app leverages computational photography to improve image quality significantly. Adobe states that Project Indigo under-exposes images more than typical cameras, capturing, aligning, and combining up to 32 frames to produce photos with reduced blown-out highlights and less noise in shadow areas. This technique results in an overall better picture quality. By employing these advanced methods, the app requires less spatial denoising, allowing for the preservation of more natural textures, even if some noise remains in the final image. The benefits of computational photography are applicable to both JPEG and raw photo formats.
Additionally, Project Indigo enhances the pinch-zoom functionality on iPhones through multi-frame super resolution. This feature restores image quality that is often lost during digital scaling, particularly when the camera focuses on the center of the image while zooming in. By capturing multiple images of the same scene and combining them, the app creates what is known as a “super resolution photo,” which contains more detail than a single image can provide.
Compatibility and Future Plans
Project Indigo is designed to be compatible with Apple’s Pro models starting from the iPhone 12 series, as well as the iPhone 14 and later non-Pro models. Currently, the app is available for free and does not require users to sign in. Adobe has also announced plans to develop a similar app for Android devices in the future, expanding its reach to a broader audience of smartphone photographers. With Project Indigo, Adobe continues to push the boundaries of mobile photography, offering users powerful tools to enhance their creative expression.
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