Adobe Launches New Computational Photography Camera App for iPhone Users

With Project Indigo, a new iPhone camera app developed by some of the same team behind the Pixel camera, Adobe unveiled its own vision for how smartphone cameras ought to function this week. The project combines professional controls, new AI-powered capabilities, and the computational photography methods made popular at Google by engineers Marc Levoy and Florian Kainz.

In their announcement regarding the new app, Levoy and Kainz present Project Indigo as a superior solution to common smartphone camera issues such as limited controls and excessive processing. Instead of employing aggressive tone mapping and sharpening techniques, Project Indigo aims to utilize “only mild tone mapping, color saturation enhancement, and sharpening.” This approach is deliberately different from the “zero-processing” methods adopted by some third-party applications. “From our discussions with photographers, it’s clear that they prefer not zero-processing but rather a more natural appearance — akin to what an SLR camera would deliver,” Levoy and Kainz state.

The new application features complete manual controls, “and the highest image quality that computational photography can offer,” whether you prefer a JPEG or a RAW file in the end. Project Indigo accomplishes this by significantly under-exposing the images it merges, and depending on a greater number of shots to combine — up to 32 frames, as stated by Levoy and Kainz. Additionally, the app incorporates some of Adobe’s more innovative photo functionalities, such as “Remove Reflections,” which utilizes AI to remove reflections from images.

Levoy departed from Google in 2020 and joined Adobe a few months afterward to create a team with the specific aim of developing a “universal camera app.” According to his LinkedIn profile, Kainz also joined Adobe that same year. While at Google, Kainz and Levoy were frequently recognized for popularizing the idea of computational photography, where camera applications depend more on software than hardware to generate high-quality smartphone images.

Google’s achievements in this field initiated a competitive race among camera technologies that has elevated standards across the board, but it has also resulted in some rather extravagant photos. Project Indigo serves as a corrective measure and poses an intriguing challenge to see if a third-party app capable of producing superior images can surpass the default options.

Project Indigo is currently available for free download and is compatible with the iPhone 12 Pro and newer models, as well as the iPhone 14 and later. An Android version of the application is expected to be released in the future.