A year ago, a rather interesting camera tool came out from the house of Lux, makers of the fantastic Kino and Halide apps. The tool is called Process Zero, which essentially ripped the images of Apple’s computational adjustments and delivered a pristine photo.
I even compared the current-gen iPhone with the iPhone 6s and realized the ills of computational photography. What I noticed repeatedly was that algorithmic processing makes the photos look sharper and more colorful, but they aren’t always accurate. And in doing so, they lose their natural charm.
That’s one of the reasons why vintage camera filter apps are popular, and film photography is also having its moment. The latest name to throw its hat in the iPhone camera arena is Adobe, and the solution is called Project Indigo, a camera app that wants to replicate the “SLR-like” look on your iPhone.
What’s it all about?
Indigo is what you would call a distilled pro-grade container. You get a healthy few manual controls, and even the ability to decide the number of frames that must be fused. On the other end of the rope, you get a custom image processing, aka computational photography pipeline, developed by Adobe’s team.
It allows only photo capture, and throws a dedicated night mode into the mix, as well. The fun part is that despite the manual controls, the app keeps capturing pictures even before you hit the shutter button. Those “extra” frames are a part of the fusion system to ensure that your photos don’t have motion artifacts or look blurry.
On the qualitative side of things, Adobe says it performs “mild tone mapping, boosting of color saturation, and sharpening.” Adobe claims it doesn’t perform smoothing effects, and even retains noise in the pictures to deliver an authentic shot.
The most alluring aspect of Indigo’s image capture is the multi-frame super-resolution, which kicks into action as soon as you kick beyond 2x or 10x (aka the natural zoom range of the lenses). For zoom capture, there are a few compromises. For example, if you’re pushing the iPhone 16 Pro’s 5x telephoto lens and electronic stabilization is enabled, Adobe says the frame is cropped by 10%, and some drift also happens, though image quality remains unaffected.
Moreover, it’s an AI-based scaling, so the results might not always look as refined. On the positive side, zooming in on long-range shots shows less grainy textures than a picture clicked using the pre-installed iPhone camera app. Moreover, all the images clicked by Indigo are saved in a DNG format, which is lighter than Apple’s ProRAW files, but contains nearly as much detail. Plus, DNGs are ideal for editing, so there’s that.
Now, let’s talk about the Pro-grade controls. There’s a histogram at the top to display sensor data, but you can also enable the timer, composition grids, a level indicator, and zebra-striping from the settings section. You can play with exposure time and ISO, focus, white balance, and exposure compensation. Indigo can’t lock the exposure at the moment, but Adobe says it will land soon in the Indigo app.
How is the output?
Right off the bat, the iPhone’s camera would seem to capture sharper photos with a more vibrant color profile. But when you compare the shots clicked by Indigo, a few differences become apparent. First, surface textures start looking a tad unrealistic due to the sharpening done by the iPhone.
Moreover, the approach it takes to rendering highlights and shadows is rather brute, because the focus is always on delivering brighter pictures with more surface details, so you often miss out on how light reflections and darker areas of a frame naturally looked.
Indigo’s clicks look a tad softer, and they take a more mellow approach to reducing noise even in daylight shots, so the pictures seem like a more accurate rendition of the real frame.
When we talk about realism, it’s not just the light behavior, but also the color chemistry. As the iPhone prefers higher exposure, elements like the tree foliage tend to look overtly vibrant. Indigo takes a more subtle approach to the image processing, and as a result, the leaves look more natural, albeit a tad subdued at saturation. The real gem is the editing pipeline.
Indigo captures the same frame in two formats: JPEG (with HDR and SDR looks) and DNG. From the app’s built-in gallery, as you export photos to Lightroom, the DNG files are imported automatically, which gives you a lot more headroom with editing. Take a look at the image below, where I achieved that look in just about 15 seconds:
The situation is not too different during low-light capture. The iPhone tends to go with a higher exposure, and as a result, struggles with color realism, especially when there are light streaks of different colors coming in from different directions. Indigo does a much better job at handling colors atop reflected surface light, especially at high zoom range when frame fusion kicks into action.
In the images below, which are taken at a 10x zoom level, the iPhone struggles with containing noise not just around the light source, but also the wall. There’s a lot of grainy texture, and the real coat of paint looks entirely different, muddying up the contrast. It has more elements to see, but at the same time, it also looks chaotic.
The frame captured by the Indigo app shows much better control at separating strong illumination from the object’s boundary, giving it a sharper look in total darkness. Moreover, it has a far more restrained grain output, and most importantly, the wall’s color is true to the real shade of paint coat applied over it.
Fixing the iPhone’s camera flaws
Here’s another sample. Take a look at this shot of a cloudy day. Once again, the iPhone goes for a warmer color tone, with a high level of sharpening done to the cloud texture. The color of the sky, however, is bluish and more accurate in the shot captured by the Indigo camera app. Moroever, it also does a better job of exposing the foliage in the trees.
Yet, it’s not a straightforward victory for either. If you zoom in, you’ll notice that the iPhone retains a tighter control over sharpness and texture, and as a result, the windows on the building and the tree leaves appear a lot sharper. In the picture clicked by Adobe’s app, you will notice a lot of grainy texture in the background elements and a lack of clarity with lines and shapes.
Indigo really shines where the iPhone runs into its limits. Take a look at the low-light shots below, which were captured at 10x zoom range from a rather dark alley. The iPhone struggled with handling noise and produced a lot of grain in the picture. Almost everything, including the direct and indirect light streaks, looks fuzzy.
Indigo benefited from using the Multi-frame super-resolution tech. I manually set it to merge 32 shots while still in handheld mode. The resulting shot was a night and day difference compared to the native iPhone camera app. The image is smoother, with far better contrast, color output, and subject sharpness. It lacks the typical characteristics of night mode photography on smartphones.
Finally, this is my favorite sample, where I put macro capabilities to the test. Once again, the iPhone defaults to a yellowish color tint. In doing so, it couldn’t properly highlight the color of the iris. At close range, it also gave a fuzzy character to the fur above the eye region, and there’s a lot of noise around the nose area.
In the shot captured by Indigo, the fur texture is cleaner and looks more natural. The app also did a fantastic job at bringing out the eye color and the subtle pink on the nose, without giving it the same tint as the rest of the frame.
Should you jump in?
Now, before you get too excited by the premise of a free camera app made by Adobe, and one which offers a superior output compared to the iPhone, there are a few aspects you must keep in mind. The Indigo app tries to solve one of the iPhone’s biggest camera woes: the algorithmic processing.
Most of the time, it does a fantastic job, but there are a few gaps that apps like Indigo try to fill. Color realism, better night mode output, and pro-grade controls are just a few of them. But to get the best out of it, you must know the basics of frame composition controls.
Moreover, the secret sauce is simultaneous DNG capture, a file format that is tailor-made for post-processing and editing in apps. Specifically, Adobe Lightroom which is loaded with fine-tuning tools, but pretty expensive at the same time.
Then there are a few technical hiccups. Image processing takes a lot of time, and if you close the app, the progress is lost. Moreover, the app is quite demanding on the local resources, and I regularly got “iPhone overheating” warnings while taking pictures.
If you like to tinker with pictures, go ahead and play with Indigo. Otherwise, for an average iPhone user, it’s just another camera app. You just might end up liking it. Otherwise, the pre-installed iPhone camera app will serve you just fine.
