Adobe launched a pro-level camera app for your iPhone

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If you’ve never looked beyond your phone’s default camera app, it’s worth doing. Both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store feature dozens of decent alternatives, giving you different interfaces and features for capturing photos and videos.

The latest arrival in this category is Project Indigo, which is now available for iOS (an Android version is apparently on the way). It’s notable because it’s from Adobe, and some of the developers were previously involved with the default camera app on Google’s Pixel phones.

The app also brings with it some interesting ideas about what mobile photography should be, and how the computational power of phone apps can be used to produce images that are better and more natural-looking than ever. Give it a try and you might find you start using it a lot more than the default option.

How Project Indigo works

Developers behind Project Indigo have written a detailed essay about the camera app, and its intentions. The app is designed to improve mobile photo quality overall, to address the “unrealistic” look of many images captured on a phone (with too much brightness and not enough contrast), and to offer more manual control over the capturing process.

Project Indigo is what’s known as a computational photography app, which essentially means some artificial processing is applied to extend what’s possible with images, beyond the information that can actually be grabbed through the camera lens. Some clever math and algorithms are applied, a little like filters in a photo editing program.

With Project Indigo, that means up to 32 different frames are captured whenever you press the shutter button, with a tendency towards under-exposure—letting less light into the image, in order to reduce clipping (where details are lost). Those frames are then intelligently combined to produce an overall image that should be natural and well balanced, including details in both the lightest and darkest parts of the frame.

To help with natural realism, Project Indigo eschews a lot of the conventional tweaks usually applied by phones: Upping the brightness and saturation, sharpening edges, and smoothing textures. These changes can make photos pop, and make them look better on smaller screens, but they reduce the authenticity of an image.

Project Indigo makes less of these changes, and applies them in more subtle ways, so the end result is something closer to what you might get from a DSLR digital camera. The modifications are automatically adjusted based on the subject of an image and its quality, and the photos can be outputted in both JPEG and RAW formats for more control.

You also get a host of manual controls with this camera app, so you can adjust focus, shutter speed, ISO, exposure, and white balance. You can even set the number of frames (up to 32 by default) that Project Indigo captures in a single burst, and make use of a special Long Exposure button for blurring fast-moving objects.

How to use Project Indigo

Download and launch Project Indigo from the iOS App Store, and your first task will be to make your way through all the permissions the app needs to take control of your camera. There’s also a handy tutorial page introducing you to the various features of the app—this pops up right at the start, but you can find it again at any time by swiping left on the histogram at the top, then tapping the gear icon and choosing Camera features.

The default capture interface that you’ll see first has two modes to choose between: Photo and Night. You can switch between them using the buttons by the main circular shutter button, or via the button up in the top right corner (which will show either a camera or a crescent moon)—in night mode, the exposure time is longer to grab the most light possible, and so you’ll need to keep the camera as still as possible.

In the top left corner, you can switch between capturing just JPEG images, or JPEG images together with RAW (DNG) images. At the top there’s a histogram showing the current brightness levels of the frame in shot, and you can swipe left on this to access a selection of key tools, including the camera timer and the grid overlay.

Down at the bottom of the capture window you’ve got buttons for adjusting the zoom and for switching between the front and back cameras. Project Indigo can apply some clever computational tricks to zoom in without losing quality. Tap the button showing two sliders (bottom right), and you’re able to access the pro-level manual controls in the app.

These controls take the form of four or five more buttons depending on the mode, which you can tap to select and configure (and access features such as Long Exposure)—you’ll see you also get more information about what’s currently in shot at the top of the screen, including shutter speed and ISO. The icon in the top left corner of the frame shows you how stable your phone is (and the more stable the better, especially for night shots).

Use the sliders that pop up on screen to make any necessary adjustments to values like exposure and white balance, and the changes are previewed in real time—you can also tap the sliders button again (bottom right) to reset these values back to their defaults. If you need any help, head back to the tips page through the settings screen (the cog icon at the top, to the right of the histogram), which also lets you configure capture images such as image stabilization.

 

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