Adobe has an under-the-radar free photography app and it’…

Adobe’s Project Indigo is not without its flaws, but it’s capable of capturing photos in JPEG + DNG simultaneously in SDR and HDR.

Smartphone users are craving more from their camera apps. Whether it's a professional-grade shooter like Halide Mark II and Samsung's Expert RAW or a minimalist photography app like ZeroCam, there's clearly demand for third-party cameras. Put simply, you may not like the style of image processing or the assortment of camera features available in the default app provided by your smartphone. Adobe made an experimental camera app for iOS last year called Project Indigo that aims to fill the gap, blending computational photography and a dash of AI with pro-level controls.

The downside is that Project Indigo, in its early stages, feels scattered. It's not a replacement for your default camera app, because it lacks crucial features like video recording. It's also not going to eliminate the need to use photo editing apps such as Lightroom, since there are only a few editing tools available within Project Indigo. That said, it's clear that Adobe is working on something brilliant here.

Many third-party camera apps give you excellent AI-powered computational photography tools or expert-grade camera controls, but not many offer both. That's what makes Adobe's Project Indigo stand out. It's cool and hip to use a camera app like Unprocess that uses no computational photography processing, which avoids the oversaturated look of photos captured by modern smartphones. The simple fact is that most smartphone cameras use a ton of post-processing because consumers like it.

The other key reason is the size of smartphone camera sensors — they're much smaller than a traditional camera, and software makes up for hardware deficiencies in sensor size and detail. Luckily, Adobe didn't denounce extra image processing with Project Indigo; it embraces it. When you capture a photo with Project Indigo, it takes a bunch of raw frames simultaneously which are then merged into a single image.

This technique is nothing new, but Adobe takes up to 32 individual frames per shot while under-exposing each frame compared to the competition. This allows photos taken with Project Indigo to look sharper with fewer traces of digital noise. Since this process reconstructs a photo from data captured in real frames, there's not as much smoothing effects used and more detail preserved. Additionally, users can shoot in either JPEG or RAW.

Project Indigo aims to provide photos that are more true-to-life despite the numerous post-processing techniques employed. It does this by taking into account information from the sensor, including camera, exposure time, and ISO, that might not be available in third-party photo editors. The result is sharp and colorful shots available in both SDR and HDR stored in a single JPEG file. The raw image, processed using an Adaptive Color Profile, is also available as a separate DNG file.

The combination of JPEG and DNG files available for each image comes in handy when it's time to photo edit. There's a button that opens a capture in Lightroom right inside the Project Indigo app, and it'll intelligently pick the DNG file for editing if one is available. Regardless of whether you open a JPEG or DNG file captured with Project Indigo in Lightroom, both the SDR and HDR color data are there.

You might not have to use Lightroom for everything, though. Project Indigo has modest image editing tools of its own, including AI Denoising. In my testing, the denoise feature successfully reduced visual noise in photos, making them look more appealing. This is an extra denoising that uses AI on top of the basic noise removal handled by Project Indigo's standard computational photography processing engine.

There's also a reflection removal feature available in Project Indigo. However, I didn't have as much success with this one. The reflection removal tool seemed to just reduce the brightness and exposure of the entire image rather than isolate and remove individual reflections. Still, since this is an experiment, Project Indigo could get better at reflection removal over time. Until then, you can always export to Lightroom to use the full crop of photo editing tools available there.

Before you capture a photo with Project Indigo, there are manual and automatic photography controls in action. Any focal length that enlarges the subject automatically activates super resolution, enhancing the image. So, when I use the 2x zoom sensor-cropping mode on my iPhone Air, the Project Indigo app uses super resolution by default. This super resolution technology isn't powered by AI. Instead, Adobe is capturing extra frames — on top of the ones taken with every shutter press — to limit noise and clear up an image.

It can help negate the quality loss that always comes with using digital zoom. The two primary shooting modes are "photo" and "night," with the latter appearing only in dark settings. As an extra, there's a "Pro" mode that activates a shooting experience with zero shutter lag. Project Indigo does this by constantly capturing frames in the background while the viewfinder is active, so there's no delay when you finally press the shutter button.

This works for not only JPEG shooting, but also DNG shooting. For professionals, Project Indigo has satisfying controls for focus, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, and white balance. There's also a long exposure mode that serves as an alternative to Adobe's typical frame-merging computational photography processing in the app. Put it all together, and Project Indigo is a camera app worth your time.

It's an experiment, and it surely won't replace your iPhone camera app in every situation. Rather, it's a neat tool for budding and professional photographers to keep in their back pocket. Project Indigo is an experimental camera app from Adobe that's exclusive to iPhone. It records multiple photos simultaneously in JPEG and DNG and SDR and HDR for maximum versatility, and uses a computational photography pipeline for processing.

Other features include AI denoise and AI reflection removal, plus pro camera settings.

Summary

This report covers the latest developments in iphone. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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