Adobe's Project Indigo Camera App Gives iPhone Cameras A Big Quality Upgrade

Google’s Pixel line of phones were known for their impressive camera quality due to its computational photography prowess, and now iPhone users will get the same kind of secret sauce for their cameras thanks to Adobe’s new “Project Indigo” camera app.

Adobe “Project Indigo” App

In fact, the two engineers behind the project – Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz – are both ex-Google employees responsible for Pixel’s camera software up until 2020, so you can expect the pair to take their learnings and apply it to Adobe’s offering here. In the blog post, both says the app offers a more natural look (as opposed to over-saturation tendencies found on most smartphones), along with full manual controls, and the capability to handle photography “in challenging conditions.”

The photography process of Project Indigo involves more under-exposed images compared to most cameras (to minimize noise), along with stacking up to 32 frames upon pressing the shutter button to form a single image – both also reduces the need for smoothing which helps retain the photo’s textures. The result is “fewer blown-out highlights and less noise in the shadows.”

The trade-off, as both noted, is longer exposure time are required, meaning you’ll have to hold the phone steady for a few more seconds. Users get to choose between the default “Photo” mode and the alternative “Night” mode, the latter of which can extend the shutter up to 32 seconds (32 frames with 1 second exposure each) when the app senses the smartphone is placed on a tripod.

There’s one more trick up Project Indigo’s sleeve – Multi-frame super-resolution. This is activated when the iPhone’s main camera is zoomed 2x or more (or 10x on telephoto), which takes “more images than [it needs] to reduce noise,” and account for user’s natural handshake to provide “slightly different viewpoints for each image.” The result is a significantly clearer image quality, as opposed to the noisy image from the native camera app’s result.

If you want to give it a try, you can grab the app from App Store for free; supported models include iPhone 14 and above, or iPhone 12 Pro and above. For Android users, don’t fret – both developers assured that it’ll be coming “for sure”, although there’s no exact timeline known so far. There are also several new features planned, some of which includes alternative “looks”, portrait mode, video recording, and more.

Pokdepinion: I definitely want it, as my Android smartphone isn’t anything special when it comes to camera capability.