Experimental camera app should make iPhone photos significantly better

With an experimental camera app, Adobe wants to tackle some long-standing criticisms of smartphone photography. Project Indigo, the name of the app initially released for the iPhone, is designed to reduce image noise significantly, make photos look more like an SLR camera and even help to remove reflections, such as when taking photos through windows. The app has now been released for the iPhone.

The free app from Adobe Labs uses computational photography to a much greater extent than the smartphone manufacturers themselves do, according to the project developers. Like other third-party camera apps, Project Indigo also gives users manual controls on request.

Up to 32 individual images per photo

At the heart of the alternative camera app is the ability to combine significantly more images than with the standard camera apps. While most smartphone cameras already combine several shots, Adobe goes even further with up to 32 individual images in quick succession. These shots are aligned by the software and merged into a final photo. This should significantly reduce image noise, which should be particularly noticeable in enlarged telephoto shots and in poor lighting. With the manual setting, photographers can set themselves how many individual images should be combined. At the same time, the app underexposes more than other camera apps to avoid blown-out highlights.

Adobe also wants to overcome the typical smartphone look with over-bright, low-contrast images, oversaturated colors and strong smoothing with its app. Instead, the focus is on a more natural image reproduction that comes closer to the style of an SLR camera. To achieve this, the app largely dispenses with aggressive local tone mapping, which brightens or darkens different areas of the image to varying degrees. The resulting images are therefore more suitable for large screens and post-processing, it is said.

Android version planned

Project Indigo offers manual controls over ISO, exposure time, focus and white balance. Another focus is on long exposure. Particularly interesting: Project Indigo can also utilize the advantages of computational photography in RAW files (DNG format). The files already contain the combined individual images, but still offer full flexibility for post-processing.

Project Indigo uses multi-frame super-resolution for digital zoom, from 2x magnification with the main lens. The iPhone 16 Pro Max, which has a 5x telephoto camera, should be able to deliver good images even at 10x magnification.

Two developers, Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz, are involved in the Adobe app. They have already co-developed the Pixel camera app from Google, which received a lot of attention from experts due to its HDR+ processing and super-resolution zoom.

Project Indigo is available free of charge in the App Store for iPhone 12 Pro/Pro Max and newer and iPhone 14 and newer. An Android version is planned, as well as a portrait mode, panorama shots and video functions.

(mki)