Adobe Project Indigo Aims To Redefine Mobile Photography

This week, Adobe introduced its vision for smartphone photography with the launch of Project Indigo. This new iPhone camera application comes from the minds of former engineers who were instrumental in developing the acclaimed Pixel camera. Project Indigo merges the advanced computational photography techniques, pioneered by Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz during their tenure at Google, with professional-grade controls and innovative AI-driven functionalities.

A New Approach to Smartphone Photography

In their official announcement of the new app, Levoy and Kainz position Project Indigo as a superior solution to common smartphone camera grievances, such as restricted controls and excessive image processing. Instead of applying harsh tone mapping and sharpening, Project Indigo aims for a gentler touch, employing what the developers describe as "only mild tone mapping, boosting of color saturation, and sharpening." This deliberate choice distinguishes it from the 'zero-processing' philosophy adopted by some other third-party applications. "Based on our conversations with photographers, what they really want is not zero-process but a more natural look — more like what an SLR might produce," state Levoy and Kainz.

Adobe

Technical Prowess and Advanced Features

The application boasts comprehensive manual controls and promises "the highest image quality that computational photography can provide," regardless of whether users prefer JPEG or RAW output. According to Levoy and Kainz, Project Indigo achieves this by significantly under-exposing the individual shots it captures and then merging a larger quantity of these frames – up to 32. Furthermore, the app incorporates some of Adobe's cutting-edge experimental photography tools, such as "Remove Reflections," an AI-powered feature designed to eradicate unwanted reflections from images.

The Visionaries Behind Indigo

Marc Levoy departed from Google in 2020 and subsequently joined Adobe several months later, tasked with assembling a team to create a "universal camera app." Florian Kainz, as indicated on his LinkedIn profile, also transitioned to Adobe in the same year. During their time at Google, Kainz and Levoy were widely recognized for popularizing computational photography, a paradigm where software plays a more critical role than hardware in delivering high-quality smartphone images. Google's achievements in this domain instigated a competitive surge in camera technology, elevating standards across the board but also occasionally resulting in overly processed photographs. Project Indigo serves as a potential recalibration and an intriguing experiment to see if a third-party application offering superior image quality can effectively challenge the convenience of default camera apps.

Availability and Future Outlook

Project Indigo is currently available as a free download. It is compatible with iPhone 12 Pro models and newer, or iPhone 14 models and newer. An Android version of the application is planned for release in the future.