Project Indigo is Adobe’s new camera app promising to fix iPhone photography
Adobe has released a free new computational photography camera app for the iPhone, dubbed Project Indigo, which could boost your iPhone photography game.
The app boosts your iPhone photography with full manual control and a custom computational photography pipeline designed to deliver different results than your standard smartphone photos, which Adobe says are “overly bright, low contrast, high color saturation, strong smoothing and strong sharpening“.
You can download Project Indigo in the App Store for free starting today. The app is compatible with the iPhone 12 Pros, iPhone 13 Pros and all iPhone 14 and all models in the iPhone 14 and later lineups. Adobe recommends using an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. The app does not require an Adobe account to use.
ihoAdobe releases Project Indigo, a new computational photography camera app for iPhone
Co-created by Marc Levoy, a former Google engineer who helped the company boost the camera of the original Google Pixel phone, the app should appeal to anyone wanting a natural SLR-like look for their photos, as well as power users who need total manual control and the highest possible image quality.
To produce that natural SLR-like look, Indigo captures a burst of photos, combining them together to produce a high-quality photo with lower noise and higher dynamic range. Your iPhone does a similar thing when taking HDR images or using Night Mode, but Indigo actually gives you control over multi-frame capture by letting you adjust the number of frames in the burst.
Besides, Indigo supports this multi-frame capture technique even when taking RAW photos with your iPhone, which many camera apps (including Apple’s) don’t do. Apple’s Camera app offers a dedicated burst mode for taking a series of photos at once, but that’s different from multi-frame capture that fuses mutliple images into a final shot.
Precise manual controls
Manual controls in the app include ISO, focus, shutter speed, exposure compensation and white balance with temperature and tint. A dedicated long exposure mode lets you take long exposure scenes with motion blur effects.
Adobe app also promises sharper digital zoom as Indigo takes multiple frames (with slight shifts based on natural handshake) when you zoom past your iPhone’s optical zoom limit and combines them into a final image.
Peruse Adobe’s blog post to dive into the technical side of things, if interested, or browse Adobe’s Lightroom album and see for yourself the kind of HDR pictures you can take with Indigo. You can also assign Indigo to the Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 family to quickly launch it from the Lock Screen, but the initial version doesn’t support swiping through camera tools with Camera Control, like Apple’s built-in Camera app.
Lightroom Mobile integration
Indigo also brings seamless integration with Lightroom Mobile so you can import your photos straight into Lightroom for editing, including toggling between SDR and HDR looks. The app can even improve shots taken through windows or glass with an AI feature called Remove Reflections.
Ultimately, Adobe hopes to create “an integrated mobile camera and editing experience that takes advantage of the latest advances in computational photography and AI,” so it sounds like the app is here to stay and Adobe plans to continue investing in its development.
The team is already planning to bring more features soon, including a portrait mode, video recording, an Android version and more.
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/06/20/adobe-project-indigo-app-computational-photography-camera/
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